January 22nd, 2011 by Mel Konner
We need to help our kids avoid a Boomer Bust.
On the last night of 2010, after the ball fell in Times Square, toasting the New Year, a couple I’ve known for decades looked pretty glum. “Why are these people celebrating?” my friend—let’s call him Jim—wondered as he looked over at the bright, smiling, cheering, mostly young faces on TV. “We’re all just another year closer to being dead.”
“Come on,” I said, the anthropologist in me stirring. “This is one of the great rituals of the modern world. We dance, we make noise, we even sing Auld Lang Syne even though nobody knows what it means. Read the rest of this entry »
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January 4th, 2011 by Mel Konner
An American between 15 and 24 commits suicide every two hours.
My last posting about the tragic and very public suicide of a sixteen-year-old boy on the grounds of my niece’s Charleston school, produced two anonymous comments (on the Psychology Today website):
CALL ME A PESSIMIST BUT-
I see first all those who failed Aaron, and a group being sad and responding after a tragedy, yes, but also acts that are self preserving of the remaining group, and few answers. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Aaron Williams, Academic Magnet High School, adolescence, Boombox Kid, Charleston SC, grief, high school, resilience, rituals, suicide, symbols, teen suicide
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December 26th, 2010 by Mel Konner
Resilience is sometimes astounding, and we need to acknowledge it.
A boy, in flames, is running, screaming, across the parking lot of his school on an otherwise ordinary morning. The image evokes Vietnam or Bosnia, but it is Charleston, South Carolina, Wednesday, December 8. The school happens to be the number-one ranked Academic Magnet High School in the United States, and it shares a campus with a highly regarded School of the Arts. The burning boy is running toward the magnet school’s front doors. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Aaron Williams, Academic Magnet High School, adolescence, Boombox Kid, Charleston SC, high school, human nature, resilience, self-immolation, suicide, teen suicide, violence
Posted in My Blog | 2,937 Comments »
December 13th, 2010 by Mel Konner
Americans love the center, and are also fond of gridlock.
I recently ended a decade on the Board of Trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation, which funds research in various branches of social science and psychology that bear on issues like race, immigration, poverty, and inequality in all its forms. It was endowed in 1907 by Margaret Olivia Sage in memory of her husband Russell Sage, and she specified that she wanted her legacy to be used toward “the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States.” My farewell remarks were made at an annual dinner two days after the election, and it being a foundation with traditionally liberal concerns, many present were worried about the direction of the country. I said this:
A couple of years ago at this event I was seated next to Barbara Solow, a respected economic historian and at eighty-something a charming and lively dinner companion. We were in the depths of the economic crisis, two wars were not going well, and some people were saying they had never seen worse times. I asked Bobbi, a child of the Depression and a Radcliffe student during the war, how worried she was. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: current crisis, midterm elections, Politics, progress, progressive change
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November 21st, 2010 by Mel Konner
Depressed? Anxious? Happy? Resilient? Thank a hunter-gatherer in your past.
I’ve considered here the high probability that obesity and diabetes are diseases of civilization and the possibility that ADHD may in part be as well. But what about other psychological symptoms and disorders? Randolph Nesse , a distinguished psychiatrist at the University of Michigan, has long been thinking about depression and anxiety in evolutionary perspective, and so have I and others.
Depression is a kind of withdrawal. Although it can be severe or long enough to hurt your reproductive options and even endanger your life, it is sometimes a symptom that gets you out of harm’s way. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: anxiety, depression, evolutionary psychology, fear, happiness, human nature, hunter gatherers, resilience
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November 12th, 2010 by Mel Konner
Religious summit finds happiness in relationships and even in suffering.
Last month at Emory (my university), the Dalai Lama was the center of a conversation-a “summit,” according to the press-on happiness. Also included were a Presiding Episcopal Bishop, the Chief Rabbi of Britain and the Commonwealth, and a famed Islamic scholar. None of them said anything about mood, and several denied that happiness has much to do with pleasure. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, Dalai Lama, faith, happiness, Happiness Summit, human nature, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, religion, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, suffering
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September 16th, 2010 by Mel Konner
Many kids we diagnose would be fine hunter-gatherers.
During my two years of research on children among the Kalahari San, or Bushmen, I watched kids scramble over huge termite hills, chase each other around the scrub brush in the savanna, practice dance steps, stop to dig up a tasty tuber, pick some berries, or throw a rock at a hapless bird or turtle which they could then cook and eat. I often wondered how many of them Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: ADHD, attention deficit, diseases of civilization, evolutionary psychology, hunter gatherers, hyperactivity, Kung, schooling
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September 10th, 2010 by Mel Konner
It’s easier when you remember that it’s about love.
A posting by Psychology Today blogger Anita Kelly produced a lively discussion (including some prudish comments on masturbation). The basic idea was that your wife is tired and resents you because she does much more of the chores and child care than you. But there also seemed to be an honest recognition of a fact that’s been proven as well as any fact about sex differences: average women desire sex less than average men. (See “Sex Differences in…Sex “). But Dr. Kelly seems to want all the compromises from him: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: female sexuality, gender, love, marriage, sex, Sex differences
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August 24th, 2010 by Mel Konner
Obesity is unnatural, but it’s natural to try for it.
This morning I sat on a panel for medical students; the subject was obesity. Nationally, as anyone who hasn’t been hiding under a rock knows, the picture is not pretty-in fact it’s pretty ugly. By the standard definition, obesity means a Body Mass Index (BMI; weight in kilos over height in meters squared) above 30, and in about 15 years starting in 1990 we went from 22 percent to 33 percent obese.
Now, I don’t care what you call it or Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Add new tag, BMI, diabetes, diet, disease, epidemic, evolutionary psychology, health, health habits, human nature, hunter gatherers
Posted in My Blog | 3,220 Comments »
