Browsing the blog archives for April, 2013.
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Randall Munroe Tells You Whether or Not It’s Worth the Time

Strategies and goals

It’s no secret that I think Randall Munroe often presents things through his XKCD comic that are not only well worth knowing, but that pertain specifically to living a better life. His most recent (as of this writing) is an especially practical example.

Is it worth the time?

A couple of useful things we can do with this chart:

  • Consider areas in our lives where it might be worth some time thinking about improvements.
  • Consider things we’re doing to make life more efficient that might not be worth the trouble.

 

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Luc to Be Interviewed on Vermont Public Radio Today

Society and culture

vteditionThis is nothing to do with writing or habits, but at about 12:45 Eastern today, I’ll be on VPR’s Vermont Edition talking to host Jane Lindholm about the new CSA Matchmaker on our Web site, which helps Champlain Valley residents find the perfect CSA. In case you’re not familiar with the term, a CSA (“Community Supported Agriculture”) is an arrangement with a farmer to pre-pay for a season’s worth of food, often picked up weekly. The CSA member gets a good deal on great local food, and the farmer gets financial stability and regular customers. If you know anyone in the area who might benefit from joining a CSA, please send them over to the site. We’re coming up on 1,000 visits so far based on word of mouth, an article in the Free Press, and other exposure, so I think it’s working.

Anyway, I’ll be talking a little bit about the CSA Matchmaker and Localsourcers. In future we plan to expand the CSA Matchmaker to many other areas, and on May 1st we’ll be launching the Localsourcers Online Forum, a community for anyone anywhere interested in sharing information and connecting about local resources, local food, sustainability, and resilience. Come join Localsourcers (free) if you’re interested in taking part.

Later addition: here’s the link to the segment.

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Rick Novy Interviews Luc at Entropy Central

Interviews

Writer Rick Novy (FishPunk, etc.) interviewed me for his Wednesday Writer series at Entropy Central: http://www.ricknovy.com/2013/04/wednesday-writer-luc-reid/ . In the interview, we cover subjects like the origin of Codex, why I gave up music, influential writers, and what new projects I’m working on.

To my regular readers, I hope you’ll excuse how unusually quiet the site has been over the past two weeks while I’ve completed and launched the  CSA Matchmaker, which helps residents of the Champlain Valley of Vermont and New York connect with farms to get deals on great local food, and then went on a brief family vacation. The articles will start flowing again this week.

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Why People Won’t Apologize

Handling negative emotions

apology

There was an interesting story by Shankar Vedantam on NPR’s All Things Considered this morning about a new study on apologies: “Why Not Apologizing Makes You Feel Better.” Most of us have been given to believe that apologizing makes things better for the apologizer as well as the apologizee, but participants in this study tended to feel better about themselves when they flat out refused to apologize.

From that factoid we might begin to think that apologizing isn’t such a great idea after all–until we start digging a little deeper. Of course, if not apologizing makes a person feel more empowered, then it makes perfect sense that it’s often hard to get people to apologize even in life-or-death situations, like when two ethnic groups can’t make peace because one won’t apologize for what they’ve done to the other.

So feeling better in the short term is all very nice, but in the longer term not apologizing hurts relationships, loses support and understanding, and creates grudges.

That alone might be enough to keep us in the apologizing mindset, but another fact is especially striking: the people who aren’t willing to apologize tend to be the people who are more insecure or who feel more threatened in the first place. So apologizing may make us feel less empowered, but it tends to mean that we already are more empowered.

To put it another way, apologizing makes us vulnerable, and as Brené Brown points out in the TED talk I mentioned in my last post, we tend to feel like vulnerability makes us weaker–and yet other people often see voluntarily vulnerability as strength.

Not to beat this idea to death, but there are some clear illustrations in what we know about body language. If you’re feeling relaxed and confident, you’re likely to leave the front of your body exposed, physically more vulnerable to harm, by not crossing your arms or holding your hands together. The “crossed arms in front of chest” pose and even the “clasped hands in front of genitals” pose are often used as though they’re “power positions,” yet what they actually communicate–and we tend to pick up on this subconsciously, even if we don’t consciously–is insecurity. If you’re interested, take a look at some of my other articles on body language for more information.

Fun post trivia: in looking for a picture to include with this post, I couldn’t find any clear, Creative Commons-licensed picture of someone apologizing for something. The closest I was able to come was this picture of people doing general apologies to people they didn’t know for no reason having to do with themselves, while wearing paper bags over their heads. (Thanks, Neal Jennings!)

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