🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Angels Again🎶
News Nuggies!📰
Loaded Gun🔫
THE DAILY UPDATE
Three Things I’m Grateful For Today:
- The commitment of the parents of the kids on my baseball team. We have truly become what I wanted us to become — a baseball family.
- My home-office view out to the woods in our backyard.
- Night sounds — frogs, crickets, owls, etc.
Pursuit of Wordle Godhood: Today’s result: Four. That went from nuthin’ to sumthin’ real fast.
Wordle 1,046 4/6
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Pursuit of Connections Godhood: Today’s result: PERFECTO! That’s two in a row
Connections
Puzzle #324
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟪🟪🟪
The song in my head when I woke up: “Anthem of the Angels,” Breaking Benjamin, for the second day in a row.
Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: Days go on forever/But I have not left your side/We can chase the dark together/If you go then so will I
Commute Tunes: No commute today. I’m on a WFH binge as I prepare to transition to a new job. Music seems to be needed for later!
Something I’m looking forward to today: A day of no work meetings.
Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Another weekend of baseball, which will take us to the halfway point in our season. Already!?!?!?
Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: Not puking. I was feeling really bad for a few hours yesterday evening. Not sure why. But I’m OK now.
What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved writing a draft for a story for a JBM client about a guy who works for TikTok. But it kinda sucked so I let it sit for the night, and then I came back and rewrote it and finished it this morning.
What I’ve written: It’s a News Nuggie Tuesday! Click here to read about how our kids aren’t OK, how we’re criminalizing sleep and what Ozzy Osbourne and Cher have in common.
Today’s Stoic Though of the Day: “Just as what is considered rational or irrational differs for each person, in the same way what is good or evil and useful or useless differs for each person. This is why we need education, so that we might learn how to adjust our preconceived notions of the rational and irrational in harmony with nature. In sorting this out, we don’t simply rely on our estimate of the value of external things, but also apply the rule of what is in keeping with one’s character.” – Epictetus
John’s translation of Today’s STD: “Hey dummy. You don’t get to say, ‘That’s just who I am.’ Who you are is an idiot if you don’t subject your opinions to regular scrutiny. Learn. Evolve. Grow. Don’t be the same dummy tomorrow that you were today.“
The biggest societal danger we face and the only hope we have for the future is groupthink. I was individual-thinking about this as I purchased Boy The Younger what will be his first phone, which we will give him on his 15th birthday in June.
Yes, we’re one of those parents who didn’t get our kids phones when they came out of the womb. It was something we felt as parents, based on everything we were witnessing anecdotally and everything the studies we read were telling us, was best delayed.
Has that been an inconvenience? Sometimes. Has it put our kids in some situations where they’ve been the oddballs? Sure. We gave them full permission as young children to blame their overly strict parents for things that might be used against them by their peers. So it’s all worked out OK.
Here’s the thing: Very few people will dispute that social media and smart phones in general have been a net societal negative. Yet because of groupthink, we keep doing what we know is bad for us.
Groupthink was a term first coined in 1971 by a Yale psychologist who observed that humans in mass quantities make dumber decisions than humans making decisions on their own. It was used heavily in the book 1984 to explain why seemingly good people tow a very bad line, and it has been applied to everything from Nazi Germany to the Bay of Pigs invasion. It is the central force behind the book Lord of the Flies.
Never is it applied positively.
The reason most people give when asked why they don’t give up Facebook or Instagram or TikTok is because they would miss out on things their “friends” were talking about. Yet if everyone used groupthink positively and left en masse, things would return to a better state and people wouldn’t miss jack shit.
Yes, my kid is turning 15, and most kids his age are on their third or fourth phone by now, I imagine. And here I am, extremely reluctantly giving into groupthink to give him his own device that, studies show, has the power to seriously fuck up his brain.
Is it any different than giving a kid a loaded gun? Sure it is. I’m not stupid. But you still can make the connection if you stretch it hard enough.
Would you please help a brutha out? I’ve created a weekly eNewsletter called News-B-Nuts in which I’ll be sending out news nuggets and witty commentary to subscribers. If you can, would you support this endeavor for just $5 a month via Patreon?