Sweet Bites
March 29, 2024
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds worthy of your time.
This week we explored loneliness, isolation, and rejection (links below).
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Any of the below bites resonate? Hit the reply button and let me know.
🦉 Wisdom
“Our internal sensors are so attuned to rejection that we feel pain even when it is remote and clearly artificial. Cyberostracism, or the feeling of being ignored or excluded online, can be triggered more easily than an in-person rejection; yet it produces a similar physical and emotional response. The problem is, in a world of likes, instant gratification, and thousands of virtual "friends," it's easy to feel ignored.”
Todd Rose
Source: Collective Illusions
📰 Article(s)
This article on CNET does a good job of looking at the loneliness epidemic currently going on. It explores the pandemic’s impact on our social relations and the health impact our lack of social interactions is having on us.
This article by NPR also explores the health ramifications of our loneliness but outlines six key ways to improve it. The six ways, per the article, are:
Strengthening social infrastructure, which includes things like parks and libraries as well as public programs.
Enacting pro-connection public policies at every level of government, including things like accessible public transportation or paid family leave.
Mobilizing the health sector to address the medical needs that stem from loneliness.
Reforming digital environments to "critically evaluate our relationship with technology."
Deepening our knowledge through more robust research into the issue.
Cultivating a culture of connection.
📖 Book Recommendation
How to Know a Person by David Brooks
David Brooks, the New York Times Opinion columnist and author of such best-selling books as The Social Animal, The Road to Character, and The Second Mountain, turns his focus on what it means to know someone.
The book explores topics such as asking good questions to better relate to someone, the power of empathy in our relations to others, what it is like to be actually seen by another human being, and much more.
A few favorite quotes:
“If you want to understand humanity, you have to focus on the thoughts and emotions of individuals, not just data about groups.”
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“People are longing to be asked questions about who they are. “The human need to self-present is powerful,” notes the psychologist Ethan Kross.”
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“Introspection isn’t the best way to repair your models; communication is. People trying to grapple with the adult legacies of their childhood wounds need friends who will prod them to see their situation accurately. They need friends who can provide the outside view of them, the one they can’t see from within.”
🎙 Listen
The Harvard Thinking podcast dives into the loneliness epidemic and speaks to two experts on the matter, Jeremy Nobel and Milena Batanova.
Nobel is part of the faculty at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health as well as the Harvard Medical School. Batanova is a director of research at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education Research, Making Caring Common.
🕺🏼 Experience
Rejection is one of the hardest things we humans face. As we discussed in our Monday Meditation and Wednesday Wisdom, our fear of rejection leads us to inaction, silence in face of disagreements, and emotional and physical pain.
In the below video, Jiang explains how he dove into the therapy known as rejection therapy, where for 100 days, Jiang asked different things of strangers.
Sure, he was rejected a bunch, but he also was surprised at how many times he received the response of “sure” and “yes”. He turned his experiences into Youtube videos and a blog which subsequently went viral, and he eventually wrote the book, Rejection Proof, which I’ve read and highly recommend.
“Rejection is just a number. And once you reach that number, a “no” will become a “yes” and you will become much better for it.”
📚 This Week’s Newsletters
Thanks for reading. Did any of these bites resonate with you? If so, hit reply and let me know.
This week we dove into the topics of loneliness, isolation, and rejection , part of our March series theme on suffering.
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Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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