the sad truth of society essay

Excerpt from WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Accepting a Reality That Feels Unacceptable

Why acceptance is the hardest and most important practice of them all..

Posted February 27, 2019 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

Right now, there’s something going on that's very difficult, something that we definitely don’t want as part of our life: this pandemic. We don’t want this to be our reality and yet it’s clear that all of our wishing it weren’t so has done nothing to make it not true. As is always the case: Fight with reality, reality wins.

And so it occurred to me (brilliantly) that this might be an auspicious time to practice acceptance, right now when we loathe this particular reality. And also, that it might be a good time to better understand what it means when we say (usually too nonchalantly) just accept what is, be with it, don’t fight it and all the other expressions we have for this very challenging and mysterious process.

When investigating an idea or practice, I like to start with what the thing is not . In this case, what are the myths and misconceptions about acceptance that get in the way of our being able to do it?

Myth #1: We’re OK with what’s happening. We can agree with it.

The biggest misunderstanding about acceptance is that it means that we’re OK with the thing we’re accepting, that we’ve somehow gotten comfortable and on board with this situation we don’t want.

Reality: Acceptance does not require that we’re OK with what we’re accepting. It does not imply that we now want what we don’t want. It does not include feeling good or peaceful about what we’re accepting. It does not mean we now agree with it.

Myth #2: Acceptance means we stop trying to change it.

We believe that accepting what is is synonymous with agreeing to be passive, giving up on change, surrendering all efforts to make things different. Acceptance is saying we agree that this situation will go on forever. It's deciding to pull the covers over our head.

Reality: Acceptance does not mean suspending efforts to change what is. It does not imply that we’re giving up on reality becoming different. Acceptance is all about now and has nothing to do with the future. Furthermore, acceptance is not an act of passivity, but rather an act of wisdom , of agreeing to start our efforts from where we actually are and considering what actually is.

Myth #3: Acceptance is failure.

In our culture, acceptance is for the meek, for losers. It's what we do when we’ve failed at doing everything else. We see acceptance as a choice-less choice, a disempowering and depressing end to a battle lost.

Reality: Acceptance is not an act of failure. It can, with the right understanding, be experienced as an act of courage. It is for those who have the strength to face the truth and stop denying it. It can be, in fact, a first step in a process of genuine success and movement.

So if not the myths, then what is this thing we call acceptance? What does it really mean to accept what is or stop fighting with reality? And, is it ever really possible (I mean really possible) to accept what is when we so don’t want what is?

To begin with, I want to throw out the word acceptance because it carries so much misunderstanding with it. Rather than asking can I accept this ? I prefer, Can I relax with this ? Or, can I be with this as it is ? Or, can I agree that this is the way it is right now ? These pointers feel more workable given what we associate with acceptance. Because the fact is, something inside us will never fully accept or get OK with what we don’t want, and that part of us needs to be included in this process too.

To relax with what is means that we also relax with the part of ourselves that’s screaming “no” to the situation. It means that we make space for the not wanting in us. So we accept the situation and also the fierce rejection of it at the same time. We don’t ask ourselves to get rid of the resistance; that resistance is our friend. It's there to protect us from what we don’t want. So we accept and allow the negative situation and also, the hating of it.

Secondly, acceptance is about acknowledging that this particular situation is indeed happening. It’s not saying that we like it, agree with it or will stop trying to change it, it simply means that we’re accepting that it’s actually what’s so. The primary element of acceptance is opening to reality as it is, not how we feel about it, just that it actually is this way.

With the situation now going on, I’m practicing relaxing with the reality that I don’t have an answer to this situation and no one does. I am accepting that this pandemic is what is and I want it to be different. Both are true; the practice of acceptance right now is about letting all of that be, and still being able to breathe...deeply.

What’s comical is that our refusal to accept what is involves a fight against what already is. What we’re fighting against is already here. We refuse to allow what’s already been allowed. Seen in this light, our refusal to accept reality has a kind of insanity to it.

When we practice acceptance, we’re just saying one thing: yes, this is happening. That’s it. And paradoxically, that yes then frees us up to start changing the situation or changing ourselves in relation to it. As a good friend said, the situation will change or you will change, but change will happen. We waste so much energy fighting with the fact that this situation is actually happening that we don’t apply our most useful energy and intention to what we want or can do about it. We’re stuck in an argument with the universe or whomever, that this is not supposed to be happening, all of which is energy down the drain. The fact is, it is this way, and acceptance allows us at least to begin doing whatever we need to do from where we are.

Acceptance of now is a profound and powerful step. It requires immense courage, to be honest about where we are. And, the willingness to feel what’s actually true, which can be excruciating, but is far more useful than denying what we already know or arguing that the truth shouldn’t be the truth. Relaxing with what is puts an end to the futile and draining argument that this is not the way it’s supposed to be, A nd most importantly, it allows us to get on with the business of living life on life’s terms.

When we accept what is, which includes our guttural “no” to it, we give ourselves permission to join our life, to experience the present moment as it is. We allow ourselves to stop fighting with reality, which is exhausting and useless. It’s counterintuitive and yet supremely wise; when we’re willing to say yes to this thing we don’t want, yes, this is the way it is whether I want it or not, something primal in us deeply relaxes. We can exhale; the hoax we’ve been conducting is up...at last. The funny thing is, we’ve always known what’s true and it’s only us we’ve been trying to trick in our non-acceptance. To accept what is offers us permission to finally be authentic with ourselves, to fully be in our own company. When we can say I accept that this is the way it is—even if I hate it and don’t know what to do about it—then we can at least be in the truth, which ultimately, is the most empowering, brave, and self-loving place from which to create our life.

Nancy Colier, LCSW, Rev., is a psychotherapist, interfaith minister, and the author of The Emotionally Exhausted Woman, Can’t Stop Thinking , The Power of Off, and Inviting a Monkey to Tea .

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Depressive realism

We keep chasing happiness, but true clarity comes from depression and existential angst. admit that life is hell, and be free.

by Julie Reshe   + BIO

I remember being depressed. It was a frightening state of mind that seemed to go on indefinitely. The very idea of waking up was riddled with dread. A state of internal turbulence, apprehension and negativity about the future propelled the total collapse of a positive and optimistic attitude. I felt like my mind suddenly became sick and twisted. I didn’t recognise my new self, and wondered what had happened to the cheerful person I used to be.

The reason for my depression was a breakup. But what led to depression was not so much the reaction to our split, but the realisation that the one you believed loved you, who was closest to you and promised to be with you forever, had turned out to be someone else, a stranger indifferent to your pain. I discovered that this loving person was an illusion. The past became meaningless, and the future ceased to exist. The world itself wasn’t credible any more.

In that state of depression, I found the attitude of others changed dramatically. Depression is not particularly tolerated in society, and I realised that those around me were of two persuasions. One group of people wanted to fix me, telling me to pull myself together or recommending professional help. The other group tended to shun me like a leper. In hindsight, I understand this reaction: after all, I had become cynical, agnostic and pessimistic, and I hadn’t bothered to be polite.

On the other hand, I developed a deeper understanding of the genuine suffering of others. In my depression, I learned about the dark side of the world, about which I knew little before. I could no longer ignore suffering and delusion, opening a new window on reality that was unpleasant indeed. My experience is not unique, but it was in some sense heightened because, in addition to being a regular human encountering a pathetic breakup, I’m also a philosopher. As a philosopher, I know that what seems to be obvious is far from always so, and therefore requires rigorous critical analysis. So, in the wake of my experience, I was especially inclined to doubt the equation of positive moods with health, and of negative moods with distortion. Could it be that, in my depression, I was finally seeing the world as it was?

B efore my own descent, I’d been confused when my PhD mentor, the philosopher Alenka Zupančič at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, suggested that the common striving for happiness constitutes a repressive ideology. What in the world could be wrong or repressive about the desire to make the world a happier place?

Yet, after observing myself, I came to agree with her. Look around and you’ll notice we demand a state of permanent happiness from ourselves and others. The tendency that goes together with overpromotion of happiness is stigmatisation of the opposite of happiness – emotional suffering, such as depression, anxiety, grief or disappointment. We label emotional suffering a deviation and a problem, a distortion to be eliminated – a pathology in need of treatment. The voice of sadness is censored as sick.

The American Psychological Association defines depression as ‘a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act’. The very term stigmatises the sufferer and implies the need for her to be cured. It’s hard to say whether therapists and the medical establishment are imposing this attitude or are influenced by the prevailing cultural paradigm. Either way, most therapies today aim to eliminate negative moods.

What if reality truly sucks and, while depressed, we lose the very illusions that help us to not realise this?

The therapy best known for purging negative thoughts is cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), originally formulated as a treatment for depression and anxiety. It is based on the cognitive model of mental illness, initially developed by the US psychiatrist Aaron Beck in the late 1960s. The premise is that depression is caused by a negative style of thought, called ‘depressogenic thinking’. When depressed, we tend to see ourselves as helpless, doomed, unlovable, deficient, worthless, blameworthy and rejected by others. Examples of this negative worldview can be exemplified by such expressions as ‘I’m worthless and ugly’, ‘No one values me’, ‘I’m hopeless because things will never change’, and ‘Things can only get worse!’ Beck suggests that in this depression we employ ‘distorted’ and unhelpful thinking patterns. CBT practitioners are trained to detect and break distorted thinking in order to set us in flight towards happier outcomes.

During my depression, under the influence of the friends I had left, I went to a CBT therapist. As you can see, I wasn’t completely cured and still find myself full of ‘depressogenic’ thinking. My feelings about the therapy varied, from a desire to trust myself and the care of the therapist to irritation at this very desire. I felt like I was told what I wanted to hear, like a child in need of comfort with a pleasant night-time story to get away from the harsh reality that was surrounding me. Depressogenic thoughts are unpleasant and even unbearable, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are distorted representations of reality. What if reality truly sucks and, while depressed, we lose the very illusions that help us to not realise this?

What if, to the contrary, positive thinking represents a biased grasp of reality? What if, when I was depressed, I learned something valuable, that I wouldn’t be able to learn at a lower cost? What if it was a collapse of illusions – the collapse of unrealistic thinking – and the glimpse of a reality that actually caused my anxiety? What if, when depressed, we actually perceive reality more accurately? What if both my need to be happy and the demand of psychotherapy to heal depression are based on the same illusion? What if the so-called gold standard of therapy is just a comforting pseudoscience itself?

M odern psychology recognises everyday thinking as largely biased, based on a number of distortions. But this recognition exists within the framework of positivity. In short, the mainstream embraces commonplace illusions as healthy as long as they don’t disrupt the positive flow.

The current concept of positive illusions first appeared in the 1980s in a paper by the psychologist Shelley Taylor of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Jonathon Brown at Southern Methodist University. Positive illusions are common cognitive biases based on unrealistically favourable ideas about ourselves, others, our situation and the world around us. Types of positive illusions include, among others, unrealistic optimism, the illusion of control, and illusory superiority that makes us overestimate our abilities and qualities in relation to others. Study after study indicates that such illusions are rife. Around 75-80 per cent of people evaluate themselves as being above average in almost all parameters: in academic ability, job performance, immunity to bias, relationship happiness, IQ. However, cruel mathematical laws tell us that this is an illusion – all, by definition, cannot be above average.

The roots of the modern positivity trend can be found in the religious past, which once provided people with guidelines for life and the notion of salvation, offering a solid picture of the world with a happy ending. In our secular world, psychology fills a void left by religion, serving to provide explanations and give hope for a better life. Replacing religion with psychology keeps many features of the Christian tradition, for instance, intact. The role of a counsellor or therapist, and our need to attend them, finds many analogies in the practice of a pastor and the tradition of confession. Both counsellor and pastor are figures with authority to claim what is wrong with you and tell you how to fix it. The French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-84) traced the origin of psychotherapy to pastorhood, elaborating on the idea that the initial religious goal of pastoral care was to deliver the individual to salvation.

The contemporary Danish scholar Anders Dræby Sørensen points out that our modern aspiration to shed suffering and anxiety and, ultimately, to discover happiness is at least partially based on the religious idea of deliverance from worldly suffering to a heavenly condition. In the secularised world, salvation becomes a task that must be accomplished in our earthly life. Heaven is no longer about the transcendental realm, but about attaining a total state of happiness and transforming Earth itself into Heaven in the now.

Next to religion and its psychotherapeutic counterpart, philosophy could be considered heresy. The most problematic patient might be the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), well known for his contention that suffering is unavoidable and a key part of human existence . Schopenhauer argued that there is no meaning or purpose to existence, and that life is moved by an aimless striving that can never be fulfilled. He turns our positive worldview upside down – the normal basic mode of our existence is not happiness that, from time to time, gets disrupted by suffering. Instead, life is itself a bone-deep suffering and endless mourning. It will never get better, Schopenhauer claimed: ‘It is bad today, and it will be worse tomorrow …’ Schopenhauer posits that consciousness further worsens the human condition, since conscious beings experience pain more acutely and are able to reflect on the absurdity of their existence. ‘I shall be told … that my philosophy is comfortless – because I speak the truth; and people preferred to be assured that everything the Lord has made is good,’ he wrote in the essay ‘On the Sufferings of the World’ (1851). ‘Go to the priests, then, and leave the philosophers in peace.’

For Freud, the goal was helping patients to accept and reflect on the hell that life is

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) doesn’t provide much reassurance either. He referred to anxiety as a basic mode of human existence and distinguishes between authentic and non-authentic human forms of living. We mostly live inauthentically in our everyday lives, where we are immersed in everyday tasks, troubles and worries, so that our awareness of the futility and meaninglessness of our existence is silenced by everyday noise. We go to work, raise children, work on our relationships, clean the house, go to sleep, and do it all over again. The world around us seems to make sense, and is even richly meaningful. But the authentic life is disclosed only in anxiety. Then we become self-aware and can begin to think freely, rejecting the shared illusion that society has imposed. For Heidegger, anxiety represents a proper philosophical mood.

The Norwegian thinker Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990) took philosophical pessimism even further. Human consciousness is tragically overdeveloped, he said, resulting in existential angst. In his essay ‘The Last Messiah’ (1933), Zapffe referred to it as ‘a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature’. Humans have developed a need that cannot be fulfilled, since nature itself is meaningless; to survive, he argues, humanity has to repress this damaging surplus of consciousness. This is ‘a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living’.

Zapffe named four universal defence mechanisms humankind has developed:

• isolation , including repression of disturbing and destructive thoughts and feelings;
• anchoring , the establishment of higher meanings and ideals. The examples of collective anchoring he gives are: ‘God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the law of life, the people, the future’. Anchoring provides us with illusions that secure psychological comfort. The shortcoming of anchoring is the despair we feel upon discovering that our anchoring mechanism is an illusion;
• distraction , the focusing of our thoughts and energy on a certain idea or task to prevent the mind from self-reflection; and
• sublimation , a type of defence mechanism in which negative urges are transformed into more positive actions. For instance, we distance ourselves from the tragedy of our existence and transform our awareness into philosophy, literature and art.

The father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was – like the philosophers – against religion, and claimed its purpose is to satisfy our infantile emotional needs. ‘Neurotics are a rabble, good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases: psychoanalysis as a therapy may be worthless,’ he reportedly told his colleague Sándor Ferenczi. Freud wasn’t optimistic about the outcome of psychotherapeutic treatment, and was reluctant to promise happiness as a result. In Studies on Hysteria (1895), he pledged that psychoanalysis could transform hysterical misery into ‘common unhappiness’. For Freud, the goal was helping patients to accept and reflect on the hell that life is. Not in any beyond, but here on Earth.

D espite its turn toward positivity , psychological theory includes one branch with a focus on the pessimistic philosophical tradition embraced by Freud himself. Called ‘depressive realism’, it was initially suggested by the US psychologists Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson in a paper subtitled ‘Sadder but Wiser?’ (1979). The authors held that reality is always more transparent through a depressed person’s lens.

Alloy, of Temple University in Pennsylvania, and Abramson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tested the hypothesis by measuring the illusion of control. After interviews with a set of undergraduates, they divided the students into depressed and nondepressed groups. Each student had a choice of either pressing or not pressing a button, and received one of two outcomes: a green light or no green light. Experimental settings presented the students with various degrees of control over the button, from 0 to 100 per cent. Upon completing the tests, they were asked to analyse the degree of control their responses exerted over outcome – that is, how many times the green light came on as a result of their actions. It turned out that, the sadder but wiser students were more accurate in judging the degree of control they exerted. Alloy and Abramson concluded that depressed students were less prone to illusions of control, and therefore showed greater realism. The nondepressed students, on the other hand, overestimated the degree of their control, and therefore were engaged in self-deception in favour of enhancing self-esteem.

The ‘depressive realism’ hypothesis remains controversial because it calls into question the tenets of CBT, which assert that the depressed individual has more thought biases and hence has to be healed in order to become more realistic. But subsequent studies have bolstered the idea. For instance, the Australian social psychologist Joseph Forgas and colleagues showed that sadness reinforces critical thinking: it helps people reduce judgmental bias, improve attention, increase perseverance, and generally promotes a more skeptical, detailed and attentive thinking style. On the other hand, positive moods can lead to a less effortful and systematic thinking style. Happy people are more prone to stereotypical thinking and rely on simple cliché. They are more likely to ‘go with the flow’ and are prone to making more social misjudgments on account of their biases.

Depressive rumination is a problemsolving mechanism that promotes analysis

Other researchers have looked at the evolutionary advantage of depression. For instance, Paul Andrews at Virginia Commonwealth University and J Anderson Thomson at the University of Virginia challenge the predominant medical view on depression as a disorder and biological dysfunction, and contend that it is, rather, an evolved adaptation. The evolutionary function of depression is to develop analytical thinking mechanisms and to assist in solving complex mental problems. Depressive rumination helps us to concentrate and solve the problems we are ruminating about.

Like a fever that can be scary in the moment but isn’t inherently bad, depression causes a decrease in functional wellbeing, impairing many domains of life, such as work, social relations and sexual life. However, though unpleasant, fever is not the product of biological malfunction. Rather, it is an important infection-fighting mechanism. The impairments that fever causes are the adaptive outcome of trade-offs in body systems needed to fight the infection. Similarly, depressive rumination is a problemsolving mechanism that draws attention to and promotes analysis of certain problems.

In her book Daseinsanalysis (2008), Alice Holzhey-Kunz, a modern, existentially oriented Swiss psychoanalyst, turns to Heidegger’s distinction between authentic and non-authentic forms of living. She claims that mental suffering signifies a disillusioning confrontation with the reality of existence. In that sense, depression is not so much a disorder as a disillusioning explosion of the nothingness of human existence. In this context, a cheerier form of what we might call ‘inauthentic living’ would hardly be a pathology since it counters acute existential awareness with everyday tasks and oblivion in the commonness.

A lthough the depression following my breakup doesn’t rise to the level of existential angst, it was the strongest perspective-shifting experience of my life. It irreversibly changed and traumatised me at the core of my being, and I am now generally sadder and more withdrawn than I used to be.

Alas, what if this is the cost of losing our illusions and learning infinitely more about reality itself? We might be getting there. Some studies suggest that existential suffering and mental distress is rising worldwide, but particularly in modern Western culture. Perhaps we chase happiness precisely because it is no longer attainable?

The vicious cycle in which we find ourselves – the endless pursuit of happiness and the impossibility of its attainment – hurts us only more. Perhaps the way out is actually accepting our raised level of consciousness. In our melancholy depths, we find that superficial states of happiness are largely a way not to be alive. Mental health, positive psychology and dominant therapy modalities such as CBT all require that we remain silent and succumb to our illusions until we die.

In closing, I must address you, my dear reader. I realise that, as you were reading this essay, you must have experienced a ‘yes, but…’ reaction. (‘Yes, life is horrible, but there are so many good things too.’) This ‘but’ is an automatic response to negative, horrifying insights. Once exposed to these forces, our positive defence mechanisms kick in. I myself was caught in the drill while writing this essay (and pretty much during the rest of my life). Without this protective measure, we would all probably be dead already, having most likely succumbed to suicide for relief.

A small proposal of mine would be to explore disillusionment and refuge from positivity as a new space to experience life, hopefully before a suicidal reaction follows. Next time, before you plunge into alcohol, or make appeals to loved ones, friends, psychotherapists or to any other of the many life-affirming practices, remember that almost all constructions of meaning – from work to sport to opening our hearts to Jesus – are inherently illusory. An alternative to running away from life through illusion is to explore an illusion-free space for as long as possible, so as to become more capable of bearing the reality of a disillusioned and concrete life. If successful, you’ll free yourself from your faux-positivity and your chains.

In the end, of course, we might not be able to liberate ourselves, either from suffering or from illusions. Life is hell, and it looks as though no heaven awaits us, to top it off. This, in itself, might be a path to liberation since, after all, we have nothing to lose.

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The Sad Truth About Society

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Women Vs. Society: The Sad Truth

I came home for dinner one night to find the most adorable red-headed little girl sitting at the kitchen table. She was all alone, so I went to talk to her. I made a point to tell her how cute she was.

All girls should be told they are beautiful.

Her response took me aback.

“No, I’m not cute,” she said.

Her shirt said, “Dance” in bright pink, sparkly letters. I asked if she liked to dance.

“No,” the girl said. “I’m too big.”

It broke my heart to hear a little girl, not even 7-years-old yet, tell me that she thought she was “too big” and “not cute.”

Society has seriously altered the way women are viewed and has effected how we feel about our bodies. Whether we realize it or not, the media has a major impact on how we act, feel and define beauty.

How often do you see a magazine cover with a strong, hardworking woman living paycheck-to-paycheck trying to support her children? Not often. 

Instead, we showcase women in minimal clothing that have been Photoshopped so much that the woman on the cover doesn’t even look like the woman in real life.

Cindy Crawford, one of the most famous models of our generation, had said upon seeing her own magazine cover, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford.”  

The media has been telling women that to be beautiful, we need to have a thin waist, large chest and a flawless complexion.

Marilyn Monroe was one of the most famous women of her time, and she was a size 16. In the world we live in today, she would be considered overweight. It’s interesting to think that back then she was considered the sexiest woman alive. So where and why do girls think that being so thin is a necessity?

This recent phenomenon has led to the increase in eating disorders and body image issues in young girls. I discovered some shocking statistics from the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders:

1)    47% of girls in 5th-12th grade reported wanting to lose weight because of magazine pictures.

2)    95% of those who have eating disorders are between the ages of 12 and 25.8

3)    81% of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat (Mellin et al., 1991).

4)    Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.

As women today, men view us as sex objects. No matter how much we fight for respect and power, we will always be competing against the opposite sex for respect.

Ladies, we have amazing traits that men don’t have. We could rule the world if we stood strong against the media’s portrayals of women and sexual discrimination, but instead, we let these stereotypes consume us.

When I read Cosmo, I can’t help but wish I looked like the women in the pictures. It is something we do subconsciously. We see skinny, scandalous women everywhere and it has been branded into our brains with a hot iron whether we realize it or not.

I went into the girl’s bathroom one day and covering the walls were quotes, notes and messages.

Before my eyes I saw messages from women who were crying for help, saying they hated themselves, were too fat, or wanted to die. These were the outcries of young, insecure women who had no one to turn to, other than a sharpie and the bathroom wall. 

Each outcry for help had a note written below it. Women had commented on these tragic notes with inspiration and encouragement.

 “You’re beautiful,” one note read, and another, “Keep your head up.”

It is amazing to see such support between women. These girls hadn’t even known who wrote these things, yet they still took the time to tell these women how important they were on the stall of a bathroom. The message within this is unexplainable.

Women are strong, independent and beautiful creatures. We can’t let media and men bring us down. We can do anything a man can do if we sent our minds to it. Take change and stand against the stereotypes. Beauty comes from within and we have to let that shine.

So, when you talk to any little girl like the one I met earlier, tell her she’s beautiful. Tell your friends you appreciate them. Remind your sisters, mothers and grandmothers you love them.

“Here is to STONG women.

May we know them,

May we be them,

May we raise them.”

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Steve Cutt's Portrayal Of The Sad Truth

Show More We as a society have become so dependent on our phones that without it we begin to feel lost and weak as if it’s a drug. Steve Cutt does a great job of depicting the true meaning of our society through these images or as he calls them the “sad truth“. The imagine that has caught my attention was the one that looked like the zombie apocalypse has taken over, except the zombies were actually us humans and our food supply are our phones ( technology ). My reaction to this image consisted of agreement and worry that we might actually be in big trouble if we continue to live a life where technology is our most important need rather than being happy with what we have. Instead we are becoming a consumer – driven society what always wants more of …show more content… One reason is that we as consumers are being greedy by wanting the latest gadgets without realizing how this will later affect our future and how we live. Second reason is as we neglect the simple things in life I believe we become ignorant of feelings and emotions. As consumerism becomes a big part of our society, the people in it fall hard for all these brands. The more each company makes off us the larger the completion rises between these companies. Their promotions begin to adjust their products for our personal wants which leaves everyone trying to buy them even if they aren’t able to afford. This causes us to appreciate the wrong things in life which leads to us being insensitive towards everything. Our need of all these technological items leaves us in a world of more complication and stressfulness because of our carelessness of reality. We much more rather live the moment through our phones or laptops. We are so involved in our phones that sometimes we fail to notice the changes of our world right in front of our eyes. Escaping our everyday life, and using our phones to live our life through the internet. Overtime we have become obsessed with technology that we can’t even go a day without it. I remember reading somewhere that the average person looks at their phone 150 times a

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On the beauty of sadness: it’s okay to say, I am sad, thank you

Tobore onojighofia tobore.

Independent Scholar, Yardley, Pennsylvania, USA

We live in times when our culture is obsessed with happiness. The value of almost every aspect of our lives is increasingly judged in terms of their contribution to our happiness. Happiness has become the ultimate goal by which values and priorities are constructed and the only thing for which any action in pursuit of does not require justification. In contrast, sadness is increasingly abnormalized and pathologized. In this paper, an effort is made to counteract the narrative that sadness, a critical aspect of human life is abnormal or a pathological condition. The evolutionary benefits of sadness and its place in human flourishing are discussed. A rebranding of sadness is proposed that emphasizes the free expression of sadness in everyday greetings to remove it from its current negative state and promote many of its benefits including post-traumatic growth and resilience.

Introduction

Happiness is a key ingredient of well-being, and most people desire it more than anything else [ 1 ]. Happy people tend to have more friends, richer social interactions and social support, higher quality of work, increased productivity, and higher income [ 2 ]. There have been different definitions of happiness based on philosophical arguments and human search for wisdom [ 3 ]. However, it has traditionally been described in two different forms: hedonic and eudaimonic [ 4 ]. Eudaimonic happiness or a well-lived life [ 5 ] occurs when people are fully engaged, and their life’s activities are in line with their true selves and values [ 4 ]. Hedonic happiness is often equated with immediate pleasure or joy, the absence of negative affect, psychophysical well-being, and a high degree of life satisfaction [ 6–8 ].

In recent years, the prevailing understanding of happiness has been the hedonic version [ 3 ]. We live in times when our culture is obsessed with this version of happiness. Evidence from a recent YouGov research indicates that over 80% of Americans wished to be happy [ 9 ]. Happiness has become the ultimate goal by which values and priorities are constructed and the only thing for which any action in pursuit of does not require justification [ 10 ]. The value of almost every aspect of our lives from relationships (friends, partners, and spouse), jobs, body, diet, etc. are increasingly judged in terms of their contribution to our happiness. Anything or anyone not contributing to one’s happiness is viewed as undesirable and unworthy of accommodation. In line with this happiness zeitgeist [ 11 ], information posted on social media by people are often socially desirable that shows them in positive or happy moments [ 12 , 13 ]. Research on happiness or subjective well-being largely studied in the sphere of positive psychology has increased in recent years [ 14 ]. Bookstores are full of self-help materials selling in the millions that promote the endless benefits of happiness [ 2 ]. In addition, demand for life coaches, social media influencers promoting wellness and positivity as well as motivational speakers has increased in recent years [ 11 ].

Distinguished as beneath depression, states of low mood or negative emotions described in the paper as sadness is an adaptive emotion and a mild temporary mood state characterized by low physiological arousal [ 15 ]. Sadness may also be described as a psychological pain typically associated with feelings of distress, loneliness, anguish, grief, etc [ 16 ]. Sadness provides significant benefits in human lives including promoting optimal performance in social judgments, memory, and motivation [ 17 ] and allowing humans to cope with losses and life’s difficulties [ 18 ]. In this environment where happiness is greatly sought after, sadness has become a great evil to be avoided. Indeed, evidence suggests that emotions associated with sadness which are known to be a critical part of the human condition are increasingly pathologized as disorders [ 19 , 20 ]. Sadness even from loss, true hardship, and discrimination is described as abnormal and personal failure which may lead to self-blame [ 21 , 22 ]. Also, this happiness zeitgeist that abnormalizes sadness has affected our treatment of mental health. Indeed, over-treatment, excessive medicalization, and ever broader definition of mental health conditions to the point where normal human life experiences are considered to be illnesses that require treatment is a pervasive and troubling problem in the field of mental health [ 23–26 ]. This happiness zeitgeist has also negatively impacted modern parenting and events in our educational institutions with pernicious national and political implications.

The objective of this paper is to discuss the importance and benefits of sadness in human lives, the dangers of treating it as a state to be avoided as well as the need for us to express it more openly for a more flourishing human experience.

Human condition, evolution, and happiness

Evidence suggests that happiness or desirable mental experiences have been of interest to humans in different cultures and throughout history [ 27 ]. Happiness is believed from an evolutionary perspective to be useful in promoting human reproduction and survival [ 28–31 ]. Winners of competition compared to losers experience an endocrinal and hedonic boost [ 32 ]. Studies indicate a key role of heritability/genetics and gene environment in happiness [ 33–36 ]. Happiness is associated with positive impact, success, good health, and good health correlates [ 3 , 37 , 38 ], greater life satisfaction [ 39–42 ], and cognitive flexibility [ 43 ].

However, from an evolutionary standpoint, perpetual happiness is impossible and is believed to likely have been evolutionarily non-beneficial or maladaptive [ 44 ]. Indeed, humans have evolved adaptations that interfere with perpetual happiness or the pursuit of happiness [ 29 ]. These adaptations include subjective distress (e.g., psychological pain, anxiety, fear, anger) from events that occur in our lives and environment, competitive adaptations (e.g., jealousy, envy) that produce psychological pain, as well as big differences between our ancestral communities and modern societies [ 29 , 45 ]. Furthermore, human experience of pleasure and satisfaction yields diminishing positive returns. The first banana you eat tastes so good, but after several, the satisfaction derived from each additional banana lessens because you grow tired of the taste. You may sleep with the most attractive person in the world, but over time, your sexual interest wanes [ 46 ]. Your greatest sexual encounter is soon replaced by another, and soon, everything is a passing memory.

These diminishing returns also extend to extrinsic achievements (e.g., wealth, power, educational attainment, work). Some people think that prioritizing extrinsic achievements will bring happiness, but evidence suggests otherwise [ 47 , 48 ]. Our modern consumer-focused society is flooded with materialistic communications (from marketing, social media wealth flaunting, rags-to-riches movie stories, and documentary series, to music videos and reality television shows depicting opulent lifestyles) that connect success, high self-esteem, social recognition, and happiness to wealth and consumption [ 49 ]. This culture linking social status to success and happiness also promotes narcissism [ 50 , 51 ], which is believed to be on the rise, especially in young people [ 52 , 53 ]. However, research shows that money can buy a person some level of happiness, but above a certain threshold, more money does not translate into more happiness [ 54 ]. Many people get richer during their lifetimes, but this does not necessarily translate into greater happiness over their lifetime.

Our competitive nature makes life an onward movement from interest to interest, from one desire to another, making constant happiness impossible. As one set of aspirations is realized, we soon move on from it in pursuit of bigger and more exorbitant aspirations, which we hope will bring us happiness [ 55 ]. For example, the pleasure of buying a new luxury car is quickly neutralized by the news that a friend just purchased a more expensive and luxurious car. The sense of personal satisfaction gained from landing your dream job quickly dissipates when you hear that a close friend was promoted to a more senior position at a larger corporation with better benefits and double the salary.

Wellness gurus and self-help coaches repeat the platitude that happiness is always within grasp if you just simply focus on the positives and stamp out “negative” thoughts [ 21 , 22 ]. They encourage cutting off anything or anyone that interferes with happiness goals. The point missed is that the world is a dynamic place and happiness is not always within grasp. Encouraging people to feign happiness amid sadness or treat sadness as nonexistent is tantamount to telling them to deny or evade reality. What happens when the individual in fervent pursuit of happiness becomes the source of the sadness because they fell on hard times or became chronically ill? Suppose they have no true friends or family around them because they have cut off every loved one or previously cut off friends and family chose to give them a dose of their own medicine by ignoring them.

Several key factors including individual and collective civic engagement, trust, and social capital, as defined by the strength of family, community, and workplace ties, are strongly linked to happiness [ 54 ]. Also, self-transcendence, selflessness, and generosity are strongly associated with increased happiness [ 48 , 56–59 ]. However, although family and social connections are important, a person cannot choose their biological family. Many people find themselves born into toxic and dysfunctional families that they want little to nothing to do with. Even good families could grow dysfunctional over time. There is no guarantee of a happy marriage or well-adjusted children, even with one’s best efforts, and there is no guarantee that your child will not die before you. Friends can betray, even with all the kindness shown to them, and generosity increases the expectation of reciprocity, which is not guaranteed. Unrequited generosity elicits great psychological pain. One could give their talents and time to a company and develop strong ties with colleagues, but at the first sign of problems, they are laid off. Companies exist to make money, and an employee is only as valuable as their ability to continually contribute to the company’s growth and development. A change in company priorities can quickly test the tie between a company and its employee, regardless of previous performance and contributions. Of all the dangers in this world, there is none greater than for an individual to base their present or future happiness, success, and livelihood on the vagaries of someone else’s interests, intentions, or behavior. The recent Silicon Valley layoffs due to the challenging economic situation is a pertinent case in point [ 60 , 61 ] where employees many of which have worked for decades at these companies were unceremoniously laid off.

Happiness has a role to play in human flourishing as evidenced by its evolutionary benefits. However, evolutionary adaptations and human dynamic life experiences interfere with perpetual happiness indicating that there is a limit to the benefits of happiness and that happiness alone is not sufficient for human flourishing.

Sadness, a critical aspect of the human condition

Evolutionary theories suggest that adaptations that lead to sadness have been largely shaped by the functional demands of our ancestral environment [ 17 , 62 ]. Neuroimaging studies on humans have shown that sadness is a basic emotion, and this is supported by activity in certain brain regions including the subgenual anterior cingulate, insular, amygdalar, and orbitofrontal activation [ 63 , 64 ]. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that sadness is associated with lower cortical activation over evolutionarily primitive systems of the brain [ 16 ]. The evolutionary foundations and PANIC/GRIEF system of sadness have been extensively described [ 65 , 66 ]. Also, epigenetic or genotypic variations have been linked to negative emotions [ 16 ]. Indeed, DNA methylation in certain genes and their associated neural processes are linked to sadness [ 16 ].

Sadness is critical for post-traumatic growth (PTG) [ 67 , 68 ] which includes a greater appreciation for life or positive reevaluation of life, better relationships, appreciation of newer possibilities, increased personal strength, and a greater sense of spiritual development from coping with a traumatic experience [ 69 ]. Research indicates that there is gene-environment interaction that promotes PTG [ 70 ]. The SARS epidemic on the general public in Hong Kong brought some positive impacts including lifestyle changes, social/family support, and increased mental health awareness [ 71 ]. Being diagnosed with a life-threatening disease elicits psychosocial and spiritual reflection that can lead a person to reorganize their values and assessment of life [ 72 ]. Indeed, cancer patients feel hgenerally more satisfied with life, likely due to their altered expectations about the future and their increased ability to value the simple aspects of everyday life [ 73 ].

Furthermore, sadness is not just an essential and normal component of human lives but an integral piece of a flourishing life [ 19 ]. Several virtues of sadness have been identified including serving as a protective mechanism from harmful situations, means of conserving resources and energy, increasing the accuracy of judgment and perception, and as means of expressing care, compassion, and love [ 19 ]. Sadness reduces judgmental errors [ 74 ]. It strengthens and promotes better eyewitness memory [ 75 ] and helps people to connect by creating a sense of shared values and togetherness [ 76 ]. It is an important architect of cognitive change, by allowing for self-reflection of goals and beliefs [ 77 ]. Sadness or negative moods have also been found to be associated with emotional and cognitive creativity [ 78 ]. Indeed, rumination and reflection are positively correlated with negative mood, and during the outbreak of COVID-19, evidence suggests that negative mood modulated creative ideation via the mediation of reflection and rumination [ 78 ]. Negative mood promotes more self-related thoughts and makes individuals more likely to engage in ruminative and reflective thinking [ 79 ].

Also, sadness promotes resilience [ 80 , 81 ]. Adverse life experiences in moderation may promote resilience, with resulting benefits for well-being and mental health [ 80 ]. Research indicates the experience of some lifetime adversity predicts lower functional impairment, lower global distress, higher life satisfaction over time, and fewer posttraumatic stress symptoms [ 80 ]. Similarly, a moderate number of adverse life experiences is associated with more positive psychophysiological responses and less negative responses to pain [ 81 ].

Many people desire happiness in their lives [ 1 ] and happiness is associated with significant benefits. However, just as food is important for human flourishing but can be harmful, happiness is not always good [ 11 ]. Our current zeitgeist which places great value on happiness may be a risk factor for depression [ 82 ]. Obsessively pursuing happiness or having happiness as the desired emotional endpoint as a goal is associated with loneliness, poor psychological well-being, and life satisfaction [ 83–86 ]. Furthermore, putting great importance on experiencing happiness may result in maladaptive emotion control [ 87 ], persistent self-mood monitoring, emotion regulatory efforts, and the denial or evasion of current unpleasant emotions considered irreconcilable with the desired positive mood [ 11 , 85 ].

The elevation of happiness as the most important thing in life in modern times contributes to the increase of helicopter parenting. Helicopter parenting is a phenomenon believed to have started rising since 1985 [ 88 ] that entails the over-involvement (child overprotectiveness in a controlling manner) of parents in their children’s lives [ 89 , 90 ]. It has become a widespread cultural norm in all social classes [ 91 ]. Helicopter parenting is linked to the need for parents to shield their children from sadness and one of its hallmarks is the tendency for parents to jump and extricate their children from sad and unpleasant experiences [ 92 ]. Helicopter parenting is associated with harmful outcomes for children including negative psychological well-being, anxiety/depression, and the consumption of prescription opioids recreationally [ 89 , 93 , 94 ]. It is associated with maladaptive behavior toward managing distressing experiences [ 95 ]. Indeed, research indicates that helicopter parenting is linked to the development of an avoidant interaction response pattern to stressful situations [ 95–97 ], children’s increased sense of entitlement, and maladaptive academic motivations [ 98 ].

The abnormalizing of sadness has also affected students’ behavior in higher learning institutions. Grade inflation is well documented over the last 30 years [ 99 ] at private and publication higher institutions of learning in the United States [ 100 ]. Happiness is associated with students ‘grades [ 101 , 102 ] and one factor that contributes to this grade inflation is the need by higher learning institutions to make students, who are increasingly treated as customers, happy [ 100 ]. Increasingly, higher institutions kowtow and placate students many of which are products of helicopter parenting for every grievance and give priority to their feelings including who speaks on campus and the teacher/professors they prefer. The recent firing of a college professor whose students complained about their grades and the class rigor is a pertinent case in point [ 103 ]. The use of student evaluation to assess teaching effectiveness is a tool that students use to punish perceived erring teachers, and this contributes to grade inflation [ 104 ]. So, a confluence of factors including students’ inability to handle the distress of poor grades, teachers who are concerned about negative student evaluation if they grade strictly on merit or impose rigor in their teaching, colleges who are concerned about student enrollment numbers, and brand image if students complain and the abnormalization of academic stress, rigor, and poor grades by linking it to mental well-being [ 105 ] are key contributors to the issue of grade inflation in recent years. If students are constantly shielded from everything or anything that causes disappointment and pain, how can they grow psychologically or deal with pain in the real world? These developments have negative implications for social, political, and national development.

Most people spend significant moments in their day in negative moods. Research suggests that while awake most people spend almost 50% of their time thinking about something different from what they are doing [ 106 ]. Daily, the average adult spends some time lost in their thoughts ruminating about events involving friends, children, spouse, career, family, and people they barely know they might have read or heard about from the news, etc. and this mind-wandering usually makes them unhappy [ 106 ]. Since many people spend a significant portion of their lives in negative moods, abnormalizing that experience as the evil twin of happiness to be avoided is harmful to human flourishing. Sadness distinguished as beneath clinical depression is a basic emotion that plays an important role in human lives from PTG to creativity. Many human achievements are the results of people’s unhappiness with the state of affairs and not their happiness with the state of affairs.

Greeting is one of the primary functions of communication that helps connect people across cultures at a personal level. It is typically associated with expressing respect and positive emotions. Describing oneself as unhappy while exchanging greetings with people may elicit concern from the other party with an offer of help because everyone is expected to be happy or doing well. Expressing sadness may also be socially undesirable as it can paint a negative image of the person expressing it. As a step toward reversing this trend of abnormalizing and pathologizing sadness, it is important for people to freely express sadness without feeling ashamed or eliciting pity, and disgust from others. A critical predictor of PTG is sharing negative emotions [ 69 , 107 ]. This paper proposes that to remove sadness from its current negative state and promote PTG, resilience, and other benefits of sadness, people should express it more frequently without any negative social ramifications. Just as one can greet by saying “I am fine, thank you or I am doing well, thank you”, one should be able to express their state of sadness not just to friends and family but to anyone by saying “I am sad, thank you or I am not doing well, thank you”, as part of normal daily greeting. Instead of saying happy holidays or happy birthday, for many people dealing with sadness, wishing them resilience and PTG is likely to be more appropriate.

Furthermore, parents should be encouraged to see sadness, not as a bad thing to protect their children from but to discuss the benefits of disappointment and sadness with their children and work with them to inculcate the values and growth that come with it. Society must move away from the abnormalization of sadness and obsession with happiness. Well-meaning institutional or government actions and policies based around the idea that sadness is bad, and people deserve and should be happy all the time are counterproductive and are likely to have pernicious consequences.

The goal of this paper is not to promote sadness but to counteract the narrative that sadness, an inescapable aspect of the human experience, should be treated as the evil twin of happiness. It is not to celebrate sadness, encourage people to pursue sadness, or wish sadness for others. But to deal with sadness and show understanding for others dealing with sadness for a more flourishing life and better human experience. It is to describe the many benefits of sadness as well as the rebranding of sadness to remove it from its current negative state. Expressing negative emotions is critical to PTG and expressing sadness in everyday greetings between people will foster solidarity and a world where people are more supportive of one another.

Finally, the greetings noted in Table 1 are for people to express sadness more freely and the responses are specifically for people who expressed sadness or are known to be dealing with sadness. Although sadness is important, individual differences exist in biological sensitivity to negative experiences [ 108 ]. Also, there exists a depression continuum where sadness lies somewhere in the middle between well-being and depression [ 109 ], indicating that the line between sadness and depression appears to be nebulous. So, people dealing with sadness they cannot manage or with persistent and deep sadness should seek support and be given all the support they need.

Alternative ways of daily greeting that express Sadness or greet people dealing with Sadness.

The above greetings are examples of ways of expressing and greeting people dealing with sadness. There are potentially many other ways to express sadness and greet people dealing with sadness. The examples above can be an inspiration for more ways to express sadness or appropriately greet someone dealing with sadness daily.

Funding Statement

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

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Sad Truth Quotes

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You never know what you can do until you have to do it.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

The sad truth is the truth is sad.

The sad truth is that opportunity doesn't knock twice.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites - day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.

The sad truth is that certain types of things can't go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can't go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that's how it will stay forever.

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.

And the sad truth is that nobody wants me to write comedy. The Exorcist not only ended that career, it expunged all memory of its existence.

There's one sad truth in life I've found While journeying east and west - The only folks we really wound Are those we love the best. We flatter those we scarcely know, We please the fleeting guest, And deal full many a thoughtless blow To those who love us best.

You don't know what you can do until you try.

If there is one sound the follows the march of humanity, it is the scream.

The sad truth is that truth is almost irrelevant in a court of law.

I've even had people tell me that I must not be a Christian because I think climate change is real. But you know, there's nothing in the Bible that says that. The sad truth is that our thought leaders - many of them in the conservative media and politics - are the ones telling us this isn't real, and we are believing them.

I grew up in Venezuela, and when I was 14-years-old, my parents decided to sell everything and come to America. Five of us lived in a two bedroom house. It wasn't a sad truth, it was just the way it was [at the time]. That feeling is so universal for every immigrant.

The sad truth is that it is precisely those who disagree most with the hypothesis of efficient market pricing of stocks, those who pooh-pooh beta analysis and all that, who are least able to understand the analysis needed to test that hypothesis.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

Evil is nothing but a word, an objectification where no objectification is necessary. Cast aside this notion of some external agency as the source of inconceivable inhumanity - the sad truth is our possession of an innate proclivity towards indifference, towards deliberate denial of mercy, towards disengaging all that is moral within us. But if that is too dire , let's call it evil. And paint it with fire and venom.

It's a strange thing, you have said it thousands of times I am sure...you will never know what you can do until you try. However the sad truth is, that most people never try anything until they know they can do it.

The sad truth is, they should never trust me.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

It's better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up here in the North.

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Life Amidst Poverty

I have lived in poverty both as a child and as an adult, and I can say with full confidence that it is a life-crushing force. I hated it. “Poverty” is also one of the most misunderstood labels that gets slapped onto individuals without their approval—cast upon them simultaneously by both unseen and more visible forces of society.

Poverty is a word loaded with preconceived notions, common misperceptions, and seemingly innocuous assumptions. What the word does not do is delve below its surface meaning, into the reality of poverty—a world that no one wants to live in.

Poverty is exhausting. Poverty is despair and desperation-inducing. Poverty is soul, dream and hope crushing. Poverty is like being enclosed in a prison cell with no doors or windows. It feels claustrophobic, as if there is no way out. Only the most resilient do not give up. Still, there is no guarantee that life will get better—and those in poverty know this all too well. They either become hardened or submit to fate. You don’t live life, you don’t thrive—you survive. You wonder if you are predestined, like a caste in another country, to live out a life destitute of fulfillment—whether financial, professional or just having a better life.

These are the very thoughts that consumed me in times of poverty. And yet, I never stopped believing that there must be a way out. The “how” and the “why” of my situation—resounding questions that were never sated—eventually fell by the wayside as I pushed towards hope. The very thing that brought despair and darkness motivated me to dig out of that prison, to fight with everything within me, to find that light that must exist outside of the walls.

In America, there is this prevalent belief that if someone just pulls herself up by her bootstraps, she can succeed. And yet, as I have learned, it is entirely possible to work your ass off and still struggle . Whether I had boots or not, whether I was barefoot, in heels, what I really learned is that resources and access to them —a network of support, and awareness of available choices—are the most influential factors in the “making it or breaking it” of life in the US. So much of this became clear to me only later—when I had the opportunity to see outside of the tiny, claustrophobic room that I had been in for years.

Living in poverty need not be a death sentence. I decided when I was 5 years old that I wanted to secure a bachelor’s degree before I was married (which I did). Throughout my childhood, I had a voracious appetite for knowledge: I was constantly hungry to learn more. In high school, I decided that upon graduation I would leave the state and my family to start a new life for myself, even though it was extremely hard and I worked three jobs at one point. In college, I knew that I wanted to live and work overseas, to expand my perspective and learn more about the world. And when life challenges blindsided me as an adult (now with two degrees under my belt), I continued to learn what my options were, what resources were available to me, and to fight hard to provide the best opportunities that I can for my own children, so that they may never see themselves as “living in poverty” or not having a shot at a better life.

Enduring poverty is not the end of hope or life. The key things needed to break down the walls that imprison those within poverty are: outside influences, support networks such as friends or family, awareness of other opportunities, and access to resources.

With this combination, a new life is possible.

• Episode 18 Digging into the New Poverty Data
• First Person My Poverty, My Trauma
• First Person Words Matter When Talking Poverty
• First Person 'People In Poverty Do Work': What Paul Ryan Misunderstands About Poverty

Restoring Hope to Baltimore Requires Making College Affordable

“I’ve always wanted to go to college. I’ve wanted to be an orthodontist since I was seven,” said 16-year-old Kayla, not realizing that because she grew up in West Baltimore the odds of her dreams coming true were very slim.

There’s a long shadow cast over Baltimore’s children. Like young people across America, they know that the ability to get a good-paying job depends on college. As teens, many of them finish high school, fill out college applications, and complete financial aid forms.  But then they find out the truth: college is unaffordable.

There is a lot of talk about elite universities offering “no loans” promises and sending letters to low-income families across the country urging their children to apply.  But that effort is relevant to a tiny few. Most people who attend college go to institutions that are far from free.

Despite massive public investment in financial aid, students from families like Kayla’s who earn less than $20,000 a year are now required to pay at least $8,000 for a year of community college and more than $12,000 a year at a public university. That “net price” is what researchers like me have found to be the real bill that students and their families face after all grants (including the federal Pell and state and institutional grants) are subtracted from the sticker price of attending college. This price has gone up substantially over time, particularly since the Great Recession.  It’s climbed as real family income for most has fallen. Worse, it may well be under-stated .

College education is central to the American Dream. But the ladder people must climb to get there has eroded, and a critical rung fell off.  After a semester or two, even the most talented students from the bottom half of the income distribution find that the price of college is more than they can afford.  They have enough money to register for classes, but they cannot pay the bills long enough to graduate .  

The young people of Baltimore know this.  Researchers tracked a set of the city’s children beginning in 1982 , when the kids were in 1 st grade.  A decade and a half later, almost two-thirds enrolled in college. But by age 28, just 17 percent had earned an associates or bachelor’s degree, with another 13 percent earning a certificate.  Nearly half who grew up poor, ended up poor, especially if they were black.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. Researchers like Stefanie DeLuca, who met Kayla while doing research on young people from Baltimore’s highest poverty neighborhoods, confirm that a strong work ethic is omnipresent there. But enrolling in college exacerbates their poverty: working two or three jobs while also taking on federal and private loans takes a heavy toll. Growing numbers of undergraduates find themselves living without sufficient food or adequate housing even as they try and focus on school.

When college is unaffordable, hope is lost.  Without degrees, young people are returning to the streets with debt, disillusioned and fearful for their futures.

Today colleges and state governments set most college prices. They are failing at this job. The opportunity to get a college education is distributed in highly inequitable ways.  Rather than promoting mobility, the broken college financing system is ensuring that economic and racial inequality gets passed down – and worsened – from one generation to the next.  Americans deserve better.

Last year, Republican Governor Bill Haslam began to restore hope in Tennessee by offering tuition-free community college.  The predecessor to the Tennessee Promise, Knox Achieves, is proving effective at helping young people who would have otherwise never experienced even a 13 th year of education earn college credits.  Helping those students complete a 14 th year, and attain a credential, may require more investment, along the lines of America’s College Promise proposed by President Barack Obama.

The initiatives of Haslam and Obama were preceded by wisdom and a smart initiative in New York. In 1969, large numbers of African Americans and Puerto Ricans demanded that the City University of New York become a place that they could enter to pursue better lives.  University administrators responded by instituting an open admissions policy to complement a very low price.  An evaluation conducted over the next 30 years revealed that while the new policy did not wipe out disadvantages due to race or class (or high school academic record), it more than doubled the proportion of black women who would attain degrees. That finding is consistent with more recent studies that raise sharp questions about the contention that “college isn’t for everyone.”

National leaders need to provide hope to young adults in Baltimore and cities like it.  Federal policy must change. Simply providing financial aid isn’t getting the job done, as it requires too little from those who establish college costs.  Instead, we need a national conversation about what it means to provide a high-quality 13 th and 14 th year of public education to everyone, and then we need to pay for it. New taxes are an option – but we can also simply stop spending where investments aren’t pay off. Ending subsidies to for-profit universities is a good place to start.

There is much to do to provide hope, dignity, and a chance at a better life to America’s poor urban youth. Part of the solution must include making college affordable.

• Analysis Free college plan will help, not hurt, low-income students
• Analysis Tethered to Hope
• Analysis To Combat For-Profit Schools, Provide Free Community College
• First Person Life Before the Affordable Care Act

To Combat For-Profit Schools, Provide Free Community College

Although it is widely documented that for-profit colleges routinely prey on low-income students , these schools have proven adept at beating back regulations that would curb their abuses. To decrease the attractiveness of for-profit schools, and their power to exploit students with low incomes, progressives should rally around President Obama’s proposal to provide free community college .

Over the last few years, for-profit colleges have come under fire from the Senate HELP committee, several federal agencies, and 37 state attorneys, with good reason . The for-profit education business model provides no incentive for schools to produce successful, educated college graduates. As a result, over half of the students who attend these schools fail to obtain a degree and struggle with mounting student loan debt. Those students fortunate enough to graduate have a hard time securing employment, as employers increasingly turn away candidates with degrees from for-profit schools.

For-profit colleges use a variety of unethical and sometimes illegal practices to persuade students to attend their schools. Some schools get leads on potential students through fake job postings on websites like craigslist or monster.com. Recent reports show a few top for-profit colleges utilize fake online health insurance and food stamp applications to collect information on potential students. Individuals who fall victim to phishing schemes like these are subsequently harassed with calls from for-profit schools until they speak with admissions representatives. Students report being called up to twenty times in a single morning, or as late as 11 p.m. When students finally succumb to the pressure and speak with a representative, they are subjected to recruitment tactics that are far more abusive.

  An example of training materials for recruiters at a for-profit college

Admissions representatives at several large for-profit schools say management promotes a variety of exploitative practices to secure enrollment. These tactics include asking callers— many of whom are low-income or people of color— to imagine what they will buy when they make six-figures, or how their family will feel when they no longer rely on a minimum wage job. Many representatives go as far as telling callers how worthless they are with just a high school diploma. Many students who were actively recruited in this manner were unable to afford—or clearly incapable of completing—the program. Some students even struggled with a range of disabilities such as brain damage and learning disorders . In one particularly high profile case , a Corporal for the U.S. Marines was enrolled at a large for-profit college, but was so severely impaired by a traumatic brain injury that he could not remember what classes he was taking.

Students who enroll as a result of this kind of manipulation often sign themselves into financial ruin. However, as long as the students attend classes, the school turns a profit. The entire business model of for-profit schools relies on cheating victims out of their dollars and dreams, which ultimately increases their reliance on safety net programs.

In contrast, community college provides crucial alternatives for those most frequently victimized by for-profit schools—people with low-incomes and people of color. Students with low-incomes are disproportionately affected by social factors (financial instability, health issues, transportation issues) that discourage investing financial resources in brick-and-mortar schools, in deference to online education. For-profit schools take advantage of this instability, promising increased upward mobility coupled with the flexibility of online schooling. As a result, low-income students enroll in for-profit schools at nearly four times the rate of other students.

  An example of student “profiles” targeted by recruiters at a for-profit college

By providing low-income students with the opportunity to attend community college at no cost, President Obama’s plan virtually eliminates the consumer base of these profit-seeking colleges, ending their large-scale fraud. Under President Obama’s plan , students receive full tuition funding if they are enrolled at least half-time at community college and are earning above a 2.5 GPA. The proposal is also beneficial because it permits students to receive Pell grants while they are at community college; this policy would help families afford living expenses while the primary caretaker focuses on school.

Obama’s initiative encourages low-income, at-risk students to consider local community colleges before for-profit schools, thereby increasing their potential economic mobility and financial wellbeing. Current estimates suggest that as many as 9 million students would benefit from the initiative.

While Obama’s proposal is not a blank check, it provides much more flexibility for students with low-incomes. More importantly, the plan could prevent millions of our country’s most disadvantaged people from enrolling in schools that prove far better at exploiting students than educating them.

• Analysis Appalachian Schools are Helping Isolated Students Go to College. Here's How.
• Analysis A Summer Vacation Free of Hunger
• Analysis Restoring Hope to Baltimore Requires Making College Affordable
• Analysis Deconcentrating Poverty is Route to Quality Schools

New York City Limits the Use of Credit Checks in Hiring

One of the recurring—and troubling—themes of TalkPoverty posts has been the overwhelming number of misguided policies that kick people while they’re down: from asset limits that tell poor people not to save, to employers’ use of criminal records that make it hard for people to find a job even decades after an infraction.

In a rare moment of good news, New York City has decided to remove one of these barriers by limiting the use of credit checks for employment screening . Last month, the City Council voted overwhelmingly to pass the strongest measure in the country on this issue, joining ten states . This measure, which Mayor DeBlasio is expected to sign on Wednesday, is a major step forward to rein in a practice that does little for employers while filtering out good employees who run into financial trouble.

Nearly half of employers check credit histories for at least some positions, according to the Society for Human Resource Management . This means that before receiving a job offer, the employer has the ability to comb through your financial history to see if you’ve paid your bills on time, and can choose not to offer you a job if you haven’t. Of course, if you’re having trouble paying your bills—because of a job loss, an illness, an irregular work schedule, or other risks that working families face—being turned down for a job isn’t going to make it easier to pay your bills or improve your credit. And so the cycle continues.

Meanwhile, credit reporting itself has its limitations. Roughly one in five credit reports contains errors , according to an analysis by the Federal Trade Commission. And the information in credit reports only reflects part of a family’s financial situation—the part that tends to reflect better on upper-income folks. Mortgage payments count toward a positive credit history—very significantly—but on-time rent payments don’t. And when low-income families pay their regular bills on time—such as rent and utilities—this positive information generally doesn’t go on credit reports, even though negative information such as late payments, nonpayments, and collections ultimately does get reported. So even when families are trying hard to pay bills on time, these bills don’t count in the same way credit cards and loan payments do.

That’s slowly starting to change. There are efforts underway to improve credit reporting to more accurately reflect credit risk and help more deserving borrowers get affordable loans, including a recent pilot where thousands of low-income families living in affordable housing were able to have their rental payments applied to their credit reports and scores. But in the meantime, families are needlessly hurt by a system that misuses financial information to make hiring decisions that hurt those who are already struggling.

To be sure, New York City’s law does have some exceptions for jobs in government, law enforcement, certain finance and tech jobs, and jobs where the employee is in charge of major financial decisions. For these jobs, one can argue that the fears of theft cited when credit screening tools are pitched to companies are more legitimate. (When I worked at the Treasury Department, for example, a credit check was required.) But the City’s new law goes well beyond other states where, for example, handling a certain amount of cash could be considered an exception. And it comes close to two bills introduced in the last Congress: one bill by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) limiting credit checks to jobs requiring a security clearance, and a bill by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) with added exemptions for some government and banking jobs.

The federal government has been catching on as well. Last fall, the US Department of Labor issued new guidance warning employers that the use of credit reports may be discriminatory. Policies designed to screen for people working in high-level positions shouldn’t apply to most jobs, never mind that even Bernie Madoff probably had a stellar credit history for most of his career.

We should follow New York’s example to keep credit reports where they belong—in the financial marketplace—and not as another barrier to hold people back from jobs and financial security because of past decisions or financial distress.

• Analysis Increasing Access to Free Tax Preparation in New York City
• Analysis Honor Work: Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit
• Analysis Reducing Jail: A New York Story
• Analysis We Need Fair Chance Hiring of People with Criminal Records

Temporary Assistance Doesn’t Help Impoverished Married Parents

Marital poverty is a serious, widespread, but mostly unacknowledged problem in the United States. Just over 9.3 million people in married-parent families live below our extremely low official poverty line . Another 6 million people live between the official poverty threshold and 130 percent of the poverty line, which is the income limit for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and only about $26,000 for a married couple with one child.

Despite these staggering numbers, there is widespread denial of the reality of marital poverty. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has gone so far to claim that being “married with kids versus unmarried with kids is the difference between living in poverty and not.” It appears he is unaware there are more married parents living in poverty in his state than never married parents living in poverty.

We know from a vast body of research that poverty and related financial stressors are risk factors for marital conflict, domestic violence, and divorce. And notable recent research by Laura Tach and Kathryn Edin found that economic factors are a more important predictor of dissolution for married parents than for cohabiting ones.

The Temporary Assistance (TANF) program should be playing a central role in helping married families overcome the kinds of economic hardship and other factors that contribute to the high divorce rate among working class families . Under the Temporary Assistance program, states receive funds to provide means-tested, re-employment assistance and other services to struggling unemployed and underemployed parents with low incomes. One of the four purposes of Temporary Assistance is to “encourage the maintenance of two-parent families.”

Despite this mandate, Temporary Assistance is failing struggling, married families. The extent of TANF’s failure is shown in the chart below. Between 2000 and 2012, the number of married parents living in poverty increased 39 percent, but the already extremely low number of married parents being helped by TANF plummeted by 54 percent . In the majority of states today, fewer than 1000 married parents receive Temporary Assistance. In Louisiana, for example, over 50,000 married parents live in poverty, but only about 50 of them receive Temporary Assistance.

Where Temporary Assistance has failed, other better-designed programs have stepped up. In 2014, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) helped 5.2 million low-income children who lived with both of their married parents, and another 1.2 million children who lived with both of their unmarried parents. Unlike Temporary Assistance, SNAP actually responded to the increase in married-parent unemployment and hardship during the Great Recession. Similarly, early evidence suggests that the Affordable Care Act—including Medicaid expansion and the Premium Tax Credit—has increased health insurance coverage among working-class married families.

How can we fix Temporary Assistance so that it doesn’t effectively exclude millions of struggling, married parents from getting the temporary financial help – as well as employment and other services – that could make the difference between staying together and splitting up?

The first and arguably most important step is to acknowledge the extent of the problem of marital poverty and hardship in the United States, and the destructive impact it has on family life.

Then we need to look at models for reforming Temporary Assistance. Most notably, the original version of the Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP) that was evaluated in the mid-1990s reduced divorce among participating disadvantaged, two-parent families. The reductions in divorce were particularly large—70 percent—among black married couples. In addition, both MFIP and Milwaukee’s New Hope Project increased rates of marriage among disadvantaged single mothers.

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These progressive demonstration projects ensured that low-income married- and cohabiting-couple families had an adequate income to support themselves while searching for work or addressing issues that limited their work capacity, including through transitional jobs, re-employment, and other services. Unlike the current Temporary Assistance program, these programs did not utilize unreasonably restrictive participation rates or harshly punitive measures that are mostly aimed at reducing the number of people who receive help; instead, these programs emphasized helping parents obtain and maintain stable employment, while meeting their basic needs.

Unfortunately, the current financial structure of Temporary Assistance and the federal law that governs it makes operating rigorously tested programs like the original MFIP or New Hope all but impossible for states. Fixing this should be at the top of the list of reforms that would help struggling, two-parent families. At the very least, the federal government should establish a national Temporary Assistance demonstration project for married and unmarried two-parent families based on the original MFIP program and New Hope. Of course, some policymakers would prefer to just talk about family values, but even in today’s polarized political environment it should be possible to move forward on a concrete initiative like this one that actually values working-class families by helping them stay together.

• Analysis How Real Food Can Help Fight Poverty
• Analysis As Affordable Rent Disappears, Lawmakers Propose Slashing Funds that Could Help
• Analysis How the Department of Labor Could Help Fix the Retirement Crisis

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The 20 Hard-Hitting Truths of Life That Will Make You Reconsider Everything

hazrakhatoon

08 May 2023

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Here are 20 truths of life that are worth remembering:

Change is inevitable: Life is constantly changing, and we have to embrace this truth about life. Everything in life is impermanent, and we must learn to adapt to new situations and circumstances. Whether it's a new job, a breakup, or a move to a new city, change is a natural part of life, and it can be an opportunity for growth and transformation.

Failure is a part of success: We often fear failure but the truth about life is that it's an essential part of success. We wouldn't learn, grow, or improve without failure. Failure is a teacher, and it helps us develop resilience and determination. It's important to remember that failure is not a reflection of our worth or abilities, but rather an opportunity to try again.

Relationships are key to happiness: Human beings are social creatures and our relationships with others are critical to our well-being. Whether it's romantic, familial, or platonic, relationships provide us with a sense of connection, support, and love. Invest time and effort into our relationships and prioritize the people who matter most to us.

Kindness is powerful: Small acts of kindness can have a significant impact on others. Whether it's holding the door open for someone, offering a compliment, or volunteering in our community, kindness can create positive ripples in the world. Remember that kindness is not a weakness, but a strength that can bring joy and positivity into our lives.

Perspective is everything: The way we view the world can shape our experiences and impact our happiness. Cultivate a positive and grateful mindset even in difficult times. Focusing on the good in our lives, practicing gratitude, and reframing negative thoughts can help us cultivate a more positive perspective.

Self-care is essential: Taking care of ourselves is not selfish but rather a necessary part of living a healthy and fulfilling life. Self-care can take many forms such as exercise, meditation, spending time in nature, or simply taking a break from our responsibilities. Prioritize self-care and make it a regular part of our routines.

Perfection is an illusion: Perfectionism is a trap that can lead to anxiety, self-doubt, and burnout. The truth about life is that no one is perfect and striving for perfection is a futile endeavor. Instead of focusing on perfection, focus on progress, growth, and learning.

Success is defined by you: Success means different things to different people, and it's important to define success on our own terms. Whether it's achieving a career goal, finding happiness in our relationships, or simply living a life that aligns with our values, success is a personal and subjective concept.

Gratitude is a game-changer: Practicing gratitude can have a powerful impact on our well-being. Gratitude helps us focus on the good in our lives, appreciate what we have, and cultivate a positive mindset. Make gratitude a regular practice, whether it's through journaling, meditation, or simply taking a moment to reflect on the good in our lives.

Life is precious: The most important truth of all is that life is precious. Time is a finite resource and it's important to make the most of the time we have. Whether it's pursuing our passions, spending time with loved ones, or making a positive impact on the world, we should strive to live a life that is fulfilling and meaningful. Life is a gift and it's up to us to make the most of it. Prioritize the things that truly matter and not take our time on earth for granted.

Cherish each moment, live with intention and purpose, and make a difference in the world in whatever way you can. Life has value and you have the power to create a life that you are proud of.

We all experience pain and suffering: No one is immune to pain and suffering in life. Whether it's physical, emotional, or mental, everyone will experience some form of pain at some point in their lives. Acknowledge and accept these experiences and seek support and resources when needed.

We are all connected: Despite our differences, we are all connected in some way. Our actions and choices have an impact on others, and the well-being of one person can affect the well-being of many. Our interconnectedness and to treat others with kindness and empathy.

Time is a precious resource: Time is one of our most valuable resources and it's important to use it wisely. It's easy to get caught up in distractions and busyness but it's essential to prioritize the things that truly matter in life.

Authenticity is key: Being true to ourselves is essential to living a fulfilling life. It's important to embrace our unique qualities, values, and experiences, and to express ourselves authentically in our relationships and endeavors.

Mindfulness is a powerful tool: Mindfulness practices such as meditation and deep breathing, can help us cultivate awareness, focus, and calmness. Incorporating mindfulness into our daily lives can help reduce stress, improve well-being, and enhance our relationships.

Success requires effort: Success rarely comes easy and requires effort, dedication, and perseverance. Set goals, create plans, and work hard towards achieving them.

Laughter is the best medicine: Laughter is a powerful tool for reducing stress, boosting mood, and improving overall health and well-being. Find humor and joy in life and not take ourselves too seriously.

Forgiveness is necessary for growth: Forgiveness is essential for personal growth and healing. Holding onto anger and resentment can weigh us down and prevent us from moving forward. Practice forgiveness, both towards ourselves and others in order to experience inner peace and growth.

We are all capable of change: Change is not easy but it is possible. We are capable of growth, transformation, and self-improvement. With effort, dedication, and support, we can make positive changes in our lives.

Love is the most powerful force: Love is a powerful force that can transform lives, heal wounds, and create connections. Cultivate love in our relationships, towards ourselves, and towards the world around us. Love is what makes life worth living.

The truths of life are complex and multifaceted, varying among individuals, cultures, and belief systems. These truths can be difficult to accept at times, such as the inevitability of death, the reality of suffering, and the unfairness of life. If you are dealing with this situation, Now&me can help you overcome this feeling and accept the reality. You can join the community of the strongest people, chat with experts online (for absolutely free) or even book a call for a video therapy session. However, these truths can also serve as a reminder to live life to the fullest, cherish the present moment, and seek purpose and meaning in our lives.

One school of thought is that the greatest truth about life lies in understanding the true nature of reality. This could involve delving into the realms of quantum physics or exploring the concept of consciousness. But it is ultimately up to you to figure out what the greatest truth for you is. Being around a close set of people can help you on this journey of discovery.

Some of the hardest truths of life are the impermanence of all things, the ultimate responsibility for our own lives and the limitations of our own knowledge and understanding.

The saddest truths of life are the inevitability of loss and change. In life, we will experience loss and change, whether it is the loss of loved ones, the end of a relationship, or a change in our circumstances. These experiences can be challenging to accept and can bring feelings of sadness and grief. Another sad truth is the reality of suffering. Suffering is a part of the human experience, and it can take many forms, such as physical, emotional, or mental. Witnessing the suffering of others or experiencing it ourselves can be a sad and difficult reality of life. Finally one truth which has bothered us all is the unfairness of life. Life is not always fair, and some people may experience more challenges or hardships than others. This inequality can be disheartening and lead to feelings of hopelessness or despair.

The ultimate truths of life is the search for the the purpose of existence. Some philosophical systems suggest that the ultimate truth is the interconnectedness of all things and the realization that everything in the universe is connected. While some suggest that the ultimate truth is the realization of impermanence, that everything in life is temporary and constantly changing.

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Science News

The bright side of sadness.

Bad moods can have unappreciated mental upsides

Evidence suggests that gloomy moods improve key types of thinking and behavior.

Vertes Edmond Mihai/Shutterstock

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By Bruce Bower

October 18, 2013 at 1:45 pm

Thomas Jefferson defended the right to pursue happiness in the Declaration of Independence. But that’s so 237 years ago. Many modern societies champion everyone’s right to be happy pretty much all the time.

Good luck with that, says psychologist Joseph Forgas of the University of New South Wales in Sydney. A lack of close friends, unfulfilled financial dreams and other harsh realities leave many people feeling lonely and forlorn a lot of the time. But there’s a mental and social upside to occasional downers that often goes unappreciated.

“Bad moods are seen in our happiness-focused culture as representing a problem, but we need to be aware that temporary, mild negative feelings have important benefits,” Forgas says.

Growing evidence suggests that gloomy moods improve key types of thinking and behavior, Forgas asserts in a new review paper aptly titled “Don’t worry, be sad!” For good evolutionary reasons, positive and negative moods subtly recruit thinking styles suited to either benign or troubling situations, he says. Each way of dealing with current circumstances generally works well, if imperfectly.

New and recent studies described by Forgas in the June Current Directions in Psychological Science illustrate some of the ways in which periods of sadness spontaneously recruit a detail-oriented, analytical thinking style. Morose moods have evolved as early-warning signs of problematic or dangerous situations that demand close attention, these reports suggest.

One investigation found that people in sad moods have an advantage remembering the details of unusual incidents that they have witnessed. And a little gloominess could help job applicants; lousy moods cut down on the tendency to stereotype others, thus boosting the accuracy of first impressions. People in sad moods also show a greater willingness to work on demanding tasks, communicate more persuasively and are more concerned with being fair to others than are peers in neutral or happy moods.

Alternatively, good moods trigger a loose mode of thought conducive to creativity and seeing the big picture. Happiness signals that a situation is safe, or at least not immediately threatening, Forgas suggests. As a result, people in a cheery state have the luxury of focusing on themselves rather than on their environments.

Whether good or bad, moods are relatively low-intensity, background feelings that can last for anywhere from a few minutes to the whole day. A person may feel somewhat good or bad, happy or sad, without knowing why or even being aware of such moods. Sad moods fall far short of clinical depression’s constant feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. But moods linger much longer than emotions, which typically flare up and burn out fairly quickly. In contrast to a mood, joy, anger and disgust feel intense and are experienced as having definite causes.

Feelings as information

Like Forgas, psychologist Norbert Schwarz of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor sees mental value in sadness. “It’s shallow and untrue to assume that positive feelings can only have positive consequences and negative feelings can only have negative consequences,” he says.

When Schwarz was a graduate student in the late 1970s, an influential line of research held that happy moods make people more likely to remember positive events and sad moods more often revive memories of negative events. That account of how feelings influence thought seemed incomplete to the aspiring psychologist. On “good” days, he reasoned, everything just felt right without any past triumphs coming to mind. On “bad” days, life felt lousy in the moment, without any tragic memories returning for an encore.

Schwarz launched a series of studies indicating that people use low-intensity moods as a source of information when forming judgments. Good and bad moods are usually experienced as being about whatever problem or situation a person currently faces, he and his colleagues found. Treating moods in this way often works out, as when a supervisor recommends someone for a raise based on feeling good about that person’s recent job performance. Feelings can mislead if, say, a boss feels happy because it’s a sunny Friday and thus approves a raise for someone who pleads for a salary hike but doesn’t deserve it.

By 1990, Schwarz and his colleagues had conducted a few studies suggesting that positive and negative moods spontaneously shape how people think. Sad moods fostered attention to details, they discovered, whereas happy moods promoted playfulness and creativity. More work was needed, though, to confirm those results and explore their implications for making decisions in various situations.

Individuals aren’t slaves to their moods, Schwarz cautions. A sad person can think outside the box if necessary, say, to solve problems at work. And a happy person can accurately fill out tax forms or complete other detail-heavy tasks.

Evidence from many labs supports Schwarz’s view that moods inform people’s judgments, often advantageously and outside of awareness, psychologist Rainer Greifeneder of the University of Basel in Switzerland and his colleagues reported in the May 2011 Personality and Social Psychology Review .

Moods provide surprisingly keen insights into one’s environment, the team concluded. Provocative support for that idea appeared in the October 2012 Journal of Consumer Research . A team led by business professor Michel Tuan Pham of Columbia University in New York City found that volunteers who trusted their feelings did better at predicting events such as how the stock market would perform in the next week and how upcoming movies would fare at the box office than volunteers who mistrusted their feelings.

By embracing their moods, superior forecasters gained unconscious access to a vast amount of learned information that informed their predictions, Pham speculated.

“In natural situations, feelings provide mostly valid information about whether there is a problem or not and how to respond to current tasks,” Schwarz says.

Power of sad                          

Forgas sees no need for a special field of research to study “negative psychology.” He would settle for “more awareness that negative feelings are so common and widespread that they must have adaptive functions.” Reports of specific ways in which sadness benefits thinking are beginning to accumulate.

Consider memory. In the January 2009 Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , Forgas and his colleagues found that shoppers in a suburban store remembered more details about what they saw in the store when they reported being in bad moods on rainy, cold days than when they felt happy on sunny, warm days.

Sad moods also improve eyewitness memory, apparently by lowering the tendency to incorporate false and misleading details into accounts of what was observed. In a 2005 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , college students witnessed a staged altercation between a lecturer and a woman who angrily interrupted the talk.

One week later, while in happy or sad moods induced by watching emotional film clips, participants read questions about the incident that included misleading information. Those in sad moods remembered what had happened much more accurately than their happy peers, Forgas and his colleagues reported. Fewer pieces of false information twisted the memories of sad students.

Sad moods can also make first impressions of others more reliable, Forgas says. People often judge those that they meet for the first time by assuming that obvious but often irrelevant traits, such as physical attractiveness, reflect intelligence, agreeableness and other as yet unknown traits. Psychologists refer to this much-studied phenomenon as the halo effect.

Negative moods topple the halo effect off its cockeyed perch, Forgas reported in the December 2011 European Journal of Social Psychology . After reminiscing about happy, sad or neutral personal experiences, volunteers read a one-page philosophical essay. Forgas attached a photograph of the writer to each copy of the essay, showing either a casually dressed young woman or a middle-aged man wearing a suit and glasses.

Happy participants rated the essay far more positively when they thought it was written by the academic-looking man. This halo effect largely disappeared among sad participants. Those in a neutral mood preferred the man’s essay, but not to the extent that happy volunteers did.

Sad folks took longer to read and rate the essays than happy and neutral participants did. That’s probably because feeling sad fostered a more careful appraisal of essays and photos, Forgas suggests. As a result, he proposes, sad volunteers largely rejected the stereotype of philosophers as tweedy, professorial men, helping to minimize the halo effect.

Cheerless cooperators

Sadness also confers some surprising social benefits. “While a positive mood may increase self-focus and selfishness, a negative mood can increase concern for others and the quality of communication,” Forgas says.

Norbert Schwarz, a psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is one of the pioneers in studying how happy and sad moods inform people about their current situation and influence their thinking styles. “We experience our moods as being real and we use them as real information,” Schwarz told staff writer Bruce Bower in an interview. “Even someone like me who studies that stuff falls prey to their own moods.”

When asked to divide raffle tickets or other prizes with a partner shown in a photo on a computer screen, sad volunteers handed out nearly even portions while happy volunteers kept the bulk for themselves, Forgas and a colleague reported in the January Computers in Human Behavior .

In another computer game, participants were informed that a partner seen only in a photo could accept or reject offers of how to divvy up prizes. No partner actually existed, but players were told that a vetoed offer would leave them empty-handed.

Again, sad volunteers shared valuables more evenly than their happy cohorts did. Sad players took longer to reach their decisions, consistent with having thought more carefully about how to make fair offers.

A gloomy mood also increased participants’ concern with fairness when the tables were turned and they had to evaluate offers from a player who didn’t really exist. Relative to the happy crowd, a substantially greater proportion of sad volunteers rejected unfair divisions of prizes, such as being offered two out of 10 lottery tickets.

In these experiments, moods were induced either by having participants watch happy or sad film clips or by falsely telling volunteers that they had scored extremely well or poorly on a test of spatial abilities.

Another study by Forgas and his colleagues, published in the August European Journal of Social Psychology , indicates that sad moods also prompt people to share information with others particularly effectively.

In one set of trials, volunteers watched clips of ambiguous, unemotional movie scenes. While in happy, sad or neutral moods, the volunteers then either verbally described the episode while pretending to talk with a friend or wrote a brief description of the scene for a friend.

In both conditions, raters determined that sad volunteers communicated more information relevant to the movie scenes and less unrelated information than the other two groups did, especially the happy folks. Those in a sad mood were especially good at keeping accounts brief, clear and to the point.

Moods were induced after participants watched movie clips but before they described the scenes, ensuring that the clips didn’t sway their manipulated moods.

Sad feelings may influence communication differently in situations where conversation partners don’t expect to share all relevant information, such as diplomatic negotiations or sales encounters. Still, Forgas contends, “everyday moods have a subtle but reliable influence on communication strategies.”

That’s something that mental health workers and medical personnel should keep in mind, he advises. Being somewhat sad may enable better communication with sick or troubled individuals. A jovial mood could promote creative insights into a patient’s condition or needs.

Gloomy payoffs

Fittingly, happiness researchers such as psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside take a positive but measured position on evidence that sadness has an upside. “Transient negative moods are absolutely beneficial when orientation to detail is warranted,” Lyubomirsky says.

Problems occur when sad moods become so frequent that they blend into an extended downer, she holds. “Happy people experience a lot more positive than negative moods, and their negative moods are not chronic.”

Chronic happiness creates its own discontents. Yale University psychologist June Gruber has reported that the sustained, one-note joy of people experiencing the manic phase of bipolar disorder leads to all sorts of personal and social misjudgments ( SN Online: 2/2/11 ).

Even brief sad moods such as those studied by Forgas sometimes provoke bad decisions, says Harvard University psychologist Jennifer Lerner. Mild sadness tends to make people more impatient and thus more apt to focus myopically on taking money now rather than waiting for a bigger financial payoff in the not-too-distant future, Lerner and her colleagues reported in the January Psychological Science .

In one experiment that involved real payoffs, sad participants typically required $37 immediately to forgo receiving a mailed check for $85 in three months, whereas neutral-mood volunteers usually held out for $56 in hand. Participants who reported feeling mildly disgusted by the topics of film clips and writing assignments needed about as much money as neutral individuals to pass up a delayed, $85 windfall. So unlike sadness, being briefly disgusted didn’t make people more likely to snap up immediate, low-ball payoffs.

Sadder isn’t wiser when it comes to making prudent financial decisions, Lerner concludes. A sad person may urgently need a shot of self-esteem, stoking a preference for instant over delayed gratification. If that’s the case, then people may make particularly rash and ill-informed financial decisions after job losses, loved ones’ deaths and other distressing events.

From Forgas’ perspective, a take-the-money-and-run approach seems reasonable if sadness accurately alerts a person to a dangerous or unstable environment.

But moods may not engage specific mental strategies as proposed by Forgas, says psychologist Jeffrey Huntsinger of Loyola University Chicago. Several recent investigations, described by Huntsinger in the August Current Directions in Psychological Science , suggest that positive moods prompt individuals to double down on any current thinking style, while negative moods trigger a shift to an alternative thinking style.

Among neutral-mood volunteers focusing broadly on an experimental task, those induced to be happy thought even more expansively about the task, whereas those prodded into sadness switched to concentrating on details. When already in a detail-oriented frame of mind, volunteers who became happy maintained that perspective, while those who became sad moved to a broad focus.

If these findings hold up, happy and sad moods simply signal whether or not to change one’s current thinking style, Huntsinger says, rather than indicating whether to adopt an analytical or playful thinking style. Researchers have yet to test which of these two possibilities best explains mood-related behaviors.

Forgas acknowledges that much remains unknown about precisely how moods influence thought. If moods work as Huntsinger suggests and not as orchestrators of specific thinking styles, Forgas says, it won’t get him down.

Not that there would be anything wrong with that.

More Stories from Science News on Psychology

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Timbre can affect what harmony is music to our ears

Not all cultures value happiness over other aspects of well-being

What parrots can teach us about human intelligence

Most people say self-control is the same as willpower. Researchers disagree

Here’s how to give a good gift, according to science

Why scientists are expanding the definition of loneliness

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20 Brutal Truths About Life No One Wants to Admit

Time is your most valuable asset -- you need to prioritize how you spend it..

It's much easier to talk about the weather, sports, and celebrities than your fear of mortality .

Unfortunately, the more time you spend pretending that ultimate truths don't exist, the more time you waste not being your authentic self and getting the most out of every precious second.

Time, not money, is your most valuable asset. Allow the list below to ignite the spark of motivation you need to make better use of the time you have on this planet.

Sometimes we need to head into the storm to appreciate the light and have a renewed passion for the beauty of life.

Here are 20 brutal truths that every single person needs to hear.

1. You're going to die and you have no idea when.

Stop pretending that you're invincible. Acknowledge the fact of your own mortality, and then start structuring your life in a more meaningful way.

2. Everyone you love is going to die, and you don't know when.

This truth may be saddening at first, but it also gives you permission to make amends with past difficulties and re-establish meaningful relationships with important figures in your life.

3. Your material wealth won't make you a better or happier person.

Even if you're one of the lucky ones who achieves his or her materialistic dreams, money only amplifies that which was already present.

4. Your obsession with finding happiness is what prevents its attainment.

Happiness is always present in your life--it's just a matter of connecting to it and allowing it to flow through you that's challenging.

5. Donating money does less than donating time.

Giving your time is a way to change your perception and create a memory for yourself and others that will last forever.

6. You can't make everyone happy, and if you try, you'll lose yourself.

Stop trying to please, and start respecting your values, principles, and autonomy.

7. You can't be perfect, and holding yourself to unrealistic standards creates suffering.

Many perfectionists have unrelenting inner critics that are full of so much rage and self-hate that it tears them apart inside. Fight back against that negative voice, amplify your intuition, and start challenging your unrealistic standards.

8. Your thoughts are less important than your feelings and your feelings need acknowledgment.

Intellectually thinking through your problems isn't as helpful as expressing the feelings that create your difficulties in the first place.

9. Your actions speak louder than your words, so you need to hold yourself accountable.

Be responsible and take actions that increase positivity and love.

10. Your achievements and successes won't matter on your deathbed.

When your time has come to transition from this reality, you won't be thinking about that raise; you'll be thinking about the relationships you've made--so start acting accordingly.

11. Your talent means nothing without consistent effort and practice.

Some of the most talented people in the world never move out from their parent's basement.

12. Now is the only time that matters, so stop wasting it by ruminating on the past or planning the future.

You can't control the past, and you can't predict the future, and trying to do so only removes you from the one thing you can control--the present.

13. Nobody cares how difficult your life is, and you are the author of your life's story.

Stop looking for people to give you sympathy and start creating the life story you want to read.

14. Your words are more important than your thoughts, so start inspiring people.

Words have the power to oppress, hurt, and shame, but they also have the power to liberate and inspire--start using them more wisely.

15. Investing in yourself isn't selfish. It's the most worthwhile thing you can do.

You have to put on your own gas mask to save the person sitting right next to you.

16. It's not what happens, it's how you react that matters.

Train yourself to respond in a way that leads to better outcomes.

17. You need to improve your relationships to have lasting happiness.

Relationships have a greater impact on your wellbeing and happiness than your income or your occupation, so make sure you give your relationship the attention and work it deserves.

18. Pleasure is temporary and fleeting, so stop chasing fireworks and start building a constellation.

Don't settle for an ego boost right now when you can delay gratification and experience deeper fulfillment.

19. Your ambition means nothing without execution--it's time to put in the work.

If you want to change the world, then go out there and do it!

20. Time is your most valuable asset--you need to prioritize how you spend it.

You have the power and responsibility to decide what you do with the time you have, so choose wisely.

A refreshed look at leadership from the desk of CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta

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The Myth of Sustainable Fashion

• Kenneth P. Pucker

Despite high-profile attempts at innovation, the industry has failed to reduce its environmental impact so far.

Few industries tout their sustainability credentials more forcefully than the fashion industry. But the sad truth is that despite high-profile attempts at innovation, it’s failed to reduce its planetary impact in the past 25 years.  Most items are still produced using non-biodegradable petroleum-based synthetics and end up in a landfill. So what can be done? New ESG strategies such as the use of bio-based materials, recycling, and “rent-the-runway” concepts have failed. Instead, we must stop thinking about sustainability as existing on a spectrum. Less unstainable is not sustainable. And governments need to step in to force companies to pay for their negative impact on the planet. The idea of “win-win” and market-based solutions has failed even in one of the most “progressive” industries.

Few industries tout their sustainability credentials more forcefully than the fashion industry. Products ranging from  swimsuits  to  wedding dresses  are marketed as carbon positive, organic, or vegan while  yoga mats made from mushrooms  and  sneakers from sugar cane  dot retail shelves. New business models including recycling, resale, rental, reuse, and repair are sold as environmental life savers.

• Kenneth P. Pucker is a professor of practice at The Fletcher School at Tufts University and was formerly the chief operating officer of Timberland. kpucker31

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Neglect and abuse: The reality of India's elderly people

We often assume that our greatest dangers are from strangers on dark streets or from violent men who might break into our houses. The sad truth is that the highest perils of brutal and persistent violence lurk within the intimate spaces of our homes, from those to whom we are closest. Little illustrates this with more poignancy and immediacy than a recent 12-city study by Helpage India. Its stunning finding is that every second elderly person who its researchers spoke to testified to suffering abuse within their families.

India is home to 100 million elderly people today. Their numbers are likely to increase threefold in the next three decades. People are living much longer and couples raising fewer children; moreover three in four elders still report living with their children. The result is that smaller numbers of adults are responsible for many more years of old-age care than ever in the past, and as bodies and minds of ageing parents dwindle, somewhere along the way in crowded urban habitats, relationships within families have come under great strain. Ugly cracks are beginning to show.

The abuse elders report are common across social classes and cities, although there are differences between cities, as Bengaluru and Nagpur report the highest elder abuse and Delhi and Kanpur the least. Four in 10 old people testify to verbal abuse, three to neglect, and a third to disrespect. One in five recount enduring such abuse almost daily, a third around once a week, and a fifth every month. Six in 10 report the daughter-in-law and an almost equal number the son as the major sources of abuse against them. Just 7% daughters are abusive of their parents, and no grandchildren.

Nearly half the old people interviewed in the study identified one common reason for their abuse in the hands of their children: That they depend economically on their children. Motilal, an ageing plumber in East Delhi, still spends much of his day repairing water taps, but still does not earn enough for his basic needs. His son denies him enough food and money for medicines. Mansi, an unlettered widow in the same city, is given only two chapatis a day by her daughter-in-law and her son refuses money even for her cataract operation. A flower-seller in Bengaluru, Ramanna, moved with his wife to live with his son as his health declined and he could no longer bear the daily rigours of street vending. But both old people are forced to work all day, ‘worse than domestic servants’, and even their simple needs are refused.

Keshav in Kolkata in desperation sold his shop to provide for his needs and those of his wife, but the money ran out and they are back to near-destitution. He lives with his four married brothers, and his wife cooks for all of them. But when she fell ill, none were willing to pay for her surgery, the money they said would be wasted on a person so old. He pleaded with the local councillor, who raised some donations. ‘It is because they are so dependent on others that old people are made to count their days until the end in our society,’ he laments.

But ironically, nearly a third of the old people feel that their abuse results not from their dependence economically on their children but from the dependence of their adult children, mostly sons, on their small incomes. Ramiah in Bengaluru has a reasonable income by renting out his house, but the income from this is the bone of contention between him and his son and daughter-in-law.

With his failing health, he spends a major part of his income on his medical care, but they harass him constantly for his money. Uma, a widow in the same metropolis, could have met her needs with her husband’s pension of Rs 10,000, but her son would snatch this away each month, and would refuse even to pay her medical costs. Unable to bear this, she finally moved out and lives alone.

Mohinder in Delhi owns both his shop, which gives him a decent income, and the house in which his two sons live. But the elder son still harasses him for money to spend on alcohol, and is rude and disrespectful as well. A widow in Kolkata, Malti, is beaten with the end of a towel by her daughter-in-law, especially after she willed her husband’s property to her daughter.

A railway pensioner in Chennai, Manilingam, could not handle the constant abuse by his son’s wife and chose to move out and live a lonely separate life. But many old people cannot bring themselves to take this terminal step: They report that even more than their economic dependence, it is their emotional dependence on their children, and most of all love for their grandchildren that binds them to their sons’ homes, even if they suffer abuse and neglect. It is these ties with her grandchildren that weigh down Lata, a widow in Nagpur, incessantly abused by her daughter-in-law whenever she considers leaving her son’s home to live by herself.

In many villages, I have seen desperately poor households migrating for work in the cities, leaving their old parents behind, to beg or invisibly die of hunger. I try not to judge them, and their parents mostly do not as well, because of the desperation of their children’s want.

Our self-image in India is of a people who lay less in store by material pursuits and uphold the institution of the family. The Helpage India report is an unhappy reminder of how distant from this the realities of the changing India are. The melancholy stories the report bring to us of the changing landscape of human relations in urban India are not of desperate want but material greed, of economic dependence and disputes over property and income resulting in growing abuse and neglect of aged people within our homes.

Harsh Mander is director, Centre for Equity Studies

The views expressed by the author are personal

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366 Words Essay on The Saddest Day of My Life

Life of each and every individual is a rare blend of tears and smiles; sadness and laughter; happy celebration as well as mourning. The pity is that tears far outnumber the moments of laughter. Shakespeare has correctly said, “The moments of happiness are rare in the general drama of pain.”

The bitter truth is that there are some days in the life of an individual that are very difficult to forget. The events of those days remain indelibly etched in his memory forever, as they are not ordinary. Such days are often instrumental in turning the course of his life. These days could be sad or happy.

I find it really too difficult to forget the 30th of November, 2002, which was the saddest day of my life. The memory of that day still sends shivers. It seemed that life had conspired against me. I had taken the M. A. (Final) Exam. We were waiting for the results. I had not done the papers well; still I hoped to get through.

Image Source : 185.26.182.219

The day started on a sad note. The results were declared. To my great surprise and disappointment, my name was not among the successful candidates. My failure was a great shock to my ailing father as well as mother and elder brother.

As if the shock of the news of my failure and worsening the condition of my father weren’t sufficiently painful, another tragedy befell. The same evening an additional mishap took place. My elder brother, who was the only bread winner of the family, was charged with embezzlement and misuse of funds. He was working as a cashier in SBI. He was disrespectfully removed from service.

This came as a great shock. My father could not bear all this. He could not think of the fate of the family without the job of him. He began to sink and died of a sudden heart attack.

We were anyway leading a hand-to-mouth existence. These events plunged my family into utter darkness. Since that day it has been a long story of useless struggle and extreme hard work for my family. We have yet to get rid of hard times and believe: misfortunes never come alone.

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The Sad Truth About Societal Rape Summary

In the article The Sad Truth About Marital Rape, by Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy written in July of 2015, the main issue relates to the hardships that Lindo Jong in “The Joy Luck Club” suffers through when she was living in China. Lindo Jong finds herself trapped in a loveless marriage dominated by her mother-in-law, in which she must endure to avoid bringing disgrace to her family . So instead of bringing shame to herself, she uses her cunning wits to escape the marriage . One of the particular hardships that Lindo Jong finds herself in, is the everyday fear of being raped by the man she has no love for. In the Non- Fiction article, it explains how Ivana Trump, the ex-wife of Donald Trump had this fear of Lindo’s come to life. Ivana Trump’s claim

Gender Expectations in Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Todays society and the society in Joy luck club are very similar because they both involve sexism. In the novel Lindo is forced by her mother in law and husband by making her a slave of some sort. But things get a little out of control when An mei gets raped by her husband but ends up marrying the guy because she has to save her so called honor. But that man that raped her, he can do anything he wants, he will not be pushed around or called names because that is the mans nature. Girls in China can not speak freely for themselves, they are supposed to be listening to the man because supposedly they are so much better and can do anything or everything unlike woman that sits around and does nothing.

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The Causes And Effects Of Rape Culture In America

Many individuals might wonder, what is rape culture? “Rape Culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women’s bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women’s rights and safety.” Most women limit their behavior because of the existence of rape. (Marshall University)

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Rape: The Dehumanization Of Women

Rape is not only frowned upon men but women as well. It really shocks me how society wants women to be sexy and dress slutty but when rape has occurred it was her fault for doing what society expects of women. Men are not taught that they have to respect boundaries of a women and advertisement support this idea. Throughout advertisements women are dehumanized and instead of being considered a human they are viewed as a sexual object. To decrease these misconception I think as a society we need to stop sexualizing women. For example, on TV if a women dresses sexy than it is okay to touch. Also on maganizes I see women surrounded around men and she appears happy, this perception is how the society views what women want. The criminal justice could

The Rape Myth Embedded Within Society Preventing Women From Gaining Justice Within The Legal System Essay

Women have always struggled in the fight to gain equality with men, despite the many advances, society still has a long way to go in addressing the issue of gender inequality. One major factor that keeps women from achieving gender equality is the many rape myths that are associated with sexual assaults. The rape myths that are deeply embedded within the Canadian legal system and society continues to have a detrimental effect on women. Using the R. v. Ewanchuck case I argue that the rape myths embedded within society prevent women from gaining justice within the legal system.

Rape Culture And Its Effect On Society

The term ‘rape culture’ was coined by feminists in the United States in 1970. The term itself was designed to illustrate the ways in which society blamed victims of sexual assault, and how the normalization of male sexual violence was acceptable. Rape culture can stem from the acceptance of rape as a daily occurrence, manifested as a male prerogative. There is a hesitation by the authorities to go against the patriarchal cultural norms, hence linking nonconsensual sex to the cultural disposition of society. The patriarchal perspective of rape culture, embedded with gender inequality and misogyny are passed through generations which ultimately leads to the extensive institutional and social acceptance of rape. Actions which advocate sexist ideals are utilized to justify and validate normative misogynistic perceptions. Rape culture sexualizes violence inflicted upon women, as it serves as a continuum of a society which views a women’s body to be sexually available by default, deriving from the overall domination and objectification of a female. The underlying cause of rape culture is localized as it based upon the social aspects of culture. For example, countries with a prolific ‘war culture’ tend to emphasize violence and masculinity, and therefore rape is viewed as a normal facet of society. I intend to parallel the element of rape culture to the enforcement of social rules and the conditioning of gender roles. I plan on analyzing the notion that within the encompassment of

Essay The Psychological Explanations of Rape

Rape is an experience which shakes the foundations of the lives of the victims. For many its effect is long term, impairing their capacity for personal relationships, altering their behaviour and values and generating fear, Temkin (1986:17).

American Rape Culture Essay

Is consent not significant nowadays, or is it just blindly ignored? Sexual assault and rape are becoming a part of an overwhelmingly high number of men and women’s lives due to society’s failure to deal with it properly. National surveys suggest that one in six women have experienced an attempted or completed rape at one time in their life, and that one in four girls. As well as one in six boys, will be sexually abused before they are 18 years old. However, for some reason, rape and sexual assault are not taken as serious as they need to be here in the United States. It’s too significant a crime to be taken as lightly as it is. These issues must be paid more attention to and have harsher punishments

Essay about The Effects of Rape Culture in Modern Society

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Even though the first amendment states freedom of expression, statistics show rape and sexual assault numbers have risen due to the presence of rape culture in modern society. Rape culture promotes more assaults and violent acts, not only towards women but also towards men. Some evidence rape culture is present in today’s society are rising statistics showing that only three out of a hundred rapists see jail time and that over 17 million American women are victims of sexual assault every year. Rape culture is seen in every aspect of daily American life, even if people do not realize it.

The Tragedy of Date Rape

In the fall of 1995, Kristin Cooper was a sophomore at Baker University in Kansas. She was a member of Alpha Chi Omega, an expert skier from the mountains of Colorado, a swimmer, and was active in band, choir and drama.

The Social Theory Of Rape

Most people would agree that as you grow up you learn by seeing, feeling ,touching , smelling, and hearing . Albert Bandura supports this by a theory he created called the Social Learning Theory (McLeod, 2011). Social Learning Theory is a theory that explains that behavior is learned by your social environment, interactions and observations of others. With this theory I would say it supports opinion in which I would say that rape is not something somebody just decides one day to do. I believe that rape is learned throughout time. There are many social and even media factors that sometimes may come off with the intention that rape is acceptable. In some media factors they may even perceive that being forcibly raped is pleasurable. Movies tend to do it often and sometimes movies don 't realize that what people see on television can sometimes influence people to see these acts as a norm. For instance the fact that a college kid is in a frat and he 's in a party there is a good percentage that he would reenact what television had stereotype frats boys to do. Television would label the frat boys as potential rapist and the human mind would consider that when you take on that role as a frat boy. One of the biggest media factors all the way from television to the internet that for so many years that perceive rape as acceptable is pornography.

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• The Joy Luck Club

THE SAD TRUTH OF SOCIETY

the sad truth of society is base on things, ways of living and acting in today society.

we are going to be seeing how money, power, influence and position has changed our today society to what it has become and how the poor don't get what is meant for them and how the rich use their money, and how the men in higher places use their position to get what ever there want from any office or administration, and without going through the normal process which these that are not in their class go through.

the society has become a place where if you don't have money, if you have influence, and if u are not in the high class you can not get what you want and this has made many people to do that is not genie and pleasant to a normal human and this have drive the society into a mess, that generation to come we not only suffer from but but drive them down to a no recognize society which we all use to know

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Fact-Checking Claims About Tim Walz’s Record

Republicans have leveled inaccurate or misleading attacks on Mr. Walz’s response to protests in the summer of 2020, his positions on immigration and his role in the redesign of Minnesota’s flag.

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By Linda Qiu

Since Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was announced as the Democratic nominee for vice president, the Trump campaign and its allies have gone on the attack.

Mr. Walz, a former teacher and football coach from Nebraska who served in the National Guard, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006 and then as Minnesota’s governor in 2018. His branding of former President Donald J. Trump as “weird” this year caught on among Democrats and helped catapult him into the national spotlight and to the top of Vice President Kamala Harris’s list of potential running mates.

The Republican accusations, which include questions over his military service , seem intended at undercutting a re-energized campaign after President Biden stepped aside and Ms. Harris emerged as his replacement at the top of the ticket. Mr. Trump and his allies have criticized, sometimes inaccurately, Mr. Walz’s handling of protests in his state, his immigration policies, his comments about a ladder factory and the redesign of his state’s flag.

Here’s a fact check of some claims.

What Was Said

“Because if we remember the rioting in the summer of 2020, Tim Walz was the guy who let rioters burn down Minneapolis.” — Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican nominee for vice president, during a rally on Wednesday in Philadelphia

This is exaggerated. Mr. Walz has faced criticism for not quickly activating the National Guard to quell civil unrest in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. But claims that he did not respond at all, or that the city burned down, are hyperbolic.

Mr. Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and demonstrators took to the streets the next day . The protests intensified, with some vandalizing vehicles and setting fires. More than 700 state troopers and officers with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources’ mobile response team were deployed on May 26 to help the city’s police officers, according to a 2022 independent assessment by the state’s Department of Public Safety of the response to the unrest.

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