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. Okay, there’s a counterphobic aspect to it—we celebrate partly because we know what you said. But we’re also toasting the joys of a pretty good year behind us, and hoping for a better one ahead.”

But their Grinchy assault on New Year’s Eve continued, despite the fact that they are among the most successful humans on the planet-both award-winners in their respective professions, with two attractive, successful kids—one happily married, one soon to be-and all the comforts of upper-middle-class life. Then Jim said something about how a great generation is passing.

I thought he meant The Greatest Generation-that of our parents, who slogged through the Great Depression, defeated Fascism, held Communism at bay and at last brought it down without triggering nuclear war, and still had the strength and optimism to raise a bunch of ungrateful brats, namely us. To the extent that it’s measureable, their suffering and sacrifice in depression, war, and political threats was far, far greater than ours.

“I’m tired of hearing about the so-called ‘Greatest Generation.’ We accomplished more than they did.” Jim was referring to rights for minorities and women, but those trends began in the forties and fifties, and our (okay, impressive) advances built on theirs. Yet, in those few minutes after midnight, as the first official Baby Boomers turned 65 (the last ones will do that twenty years from now), a pall of gloom hung over our whole generation.

According to a Pew Research Center survey, Boomers are more dissatisfied (at 80 percent!) than any other age group, even the elderly. Dissatisfaction among Millennials (18-29), hit far harder by unemployment, is only 60 percent. Yet we Boomers seem to think we’ve suffered most from the Great Recession, and we’re the most likely to think that our standard of living is lower than that of our parents.

The reality is we’ve been living high off the hog all our self-absorbed lives, borrowing relentlessly against our children’s future. Our parents handed us a national debt equal to 28 percent of GDP; we’re handing our kids a debt proportionally more than double that, at 62 percent of current GDP. And we’re not stopping any time soon: Boomers are more likely than other adults to oppose raising the age for Social Security benefits or taxing high-end health insurance benefits.

We lost money in the recent crisis, so we may have to postpone retirement. O dreadful news! Social Security was slated to start at 65 when people only lived a few years after that, and many were already feeble. Today 65 is the new 50 and, with Medicare paying the doctor’s bills and Social Security paying the rent, we can expect to live a couple of decades at our kids’ expense. Would it really break our hearts to start at 67, so our kids can have a good life as well?

We are eating their seed corn and whining all the way. The Boomer Bust will come crashing down on them and their kids, and they will look back and curse our selfishness, just as we look back, and if we are honest, thank The Greatest Generation for their sacrifices. I’m one of the ones who will turn 65 this calendar year, so like the other first-year Boomers, I had what I call my Beatles birthday last year—you know, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?”

Most Boomers reaching 64, will be able to answer yes to those questions. Of course, those who have lost jobs or homes in this crisis are experiencing disaster at a very awkward time of life. But that is not most of us. On the whole, life has been good to Boomers, and we need to appreciate it. Do I have bad moments in the middle of the night, thinking about my losses-physical, economic, and worst of all in unfulfilled dreams? Sure, and so did all generations before ours. But they sucked it up, and so can we.

Last night I went to the 60th birthday party of another friend. The poor guy’s face was the very picture of Boomer Gloom. I told him life begins at 60, which is a gross exaggeration, but it’s no lie to repeat the cliché: This is the first day of the rest of your life. What’s the alternative? Walking around with a frown on our face for whatever time we have left? Spreading debt and regret to younger generations?

Get over it. Put a smile on your face and a hand on the shoulder of someone younger. Give them a little push forward and let them know that life is good, that when they get older it can still be good. Let’s put an end to Boomer Doom and Gloom. As one of the oldest of that privileged and successful generation, that’s the advice I have for everyone in it, starting with myself.

Note: By invitation, I’ve started a blog on the Psychology Today website, and my latest post can be read there or here, although different comments may be  posted there.

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.

What was his private hell?

What failure of parents and school and friends occurred?

How can we fix all of it?

Hard questions.
Not just symbolic gestures are what the situation requires IMHO.

And:

Its the usual thing… We show compassion on a certain individual when they die. I think the life of Aaron calls the attention of every one of us to show compassion for others…

My reaction is to ask, “How do you know that anyone failed Aaron?” Because he took his own life? Because he did it in a public way that seemed as if it could have be vengeful? Because you believe that every suicide can be prevented by compassion?

There was not the slightest evidence that Aaron’s fellow students lacked compassion for him while he was alive among them, much less that there had been any bullying. His schoolmates tolerated his moods and eccentricities, which included playing his boombox loudly on his shoulder between classes, for which he was affectionately nicknamed “Boombox Kid.”

As for the adults around him-parents, teachers, counselors-there is every indication that his “private hell” was recognized and that many were trying to help him. And the fact is that no, not every suicide can be prevented by compassion, or psychotherapy, or medication, or all of them put together.

Someone between fifteen and twenty-four commits suicide roughly once every two hours in the U.S., and although some well-publicized and especially tragic cases have been associated with bullying, most are not. Many are associated with depression, but although girls are three times as likely as boys to be depressed-and even twice as likely to attempt suicide-boys are four to five times more likely to actually kill themselves.

Should we look for warning signs-depression, isolation, substance abuse, suicidal ideation, attempts at self-harm, and so on? Of course we should, and we should intervene when we see them. For a young person especially, “It gets better” is a true and helpful message. Limiting access to firearms and drugs is surely a plus.

But the tools of prediction are far from perfect. We can’t keep every moody teen on suicide watch, and there is so far no form of compassion guaranteed to prevent an impulsive youngster from taking his own life. The teenage years are characterized by unprecedented hormonal surges that take place years earlier in a child’s life than they did in centuries past.

Equally important, we have learned in the past decade or two that myelination and neurotransmitter development in the parts of the frontal lobes that help us inhibit impulses do not reach mature status until after age twenty. Adolescents are impulsive and their inhibitory abilities are weak.

Of the thousands who take their own lives each year, many can surely be prevented from doing so. Children are bullied, warning signs go unheeded, mental illnesses are often not recognized or treated until it is too late. But all these problems have been known for many years. They are not solved of course, and we need to do better, but they have gotten attention, and all our collective efforts have reduced the suicide rate-a little bit.

Meanwhile, there are many puzzles. The huge gender disparity tells us that girls are not always worse off than boys, and underscores the relationship between successful suicide and aggression. We could no doubt figure out how to do more with this information.

Perhaps the greatest paradox is that African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, both disadvantaged minority groups, who are in a sense constantly bullied by society, have much lower suicide rates at all ages than Non-Hispanic Whites do. Only the Native American/Alaskan Native minority exceeds the dominant white majority in this tragic way of ending human life. If we understand the first things about suicide, why can’t we explain why some oppressed minorities are so much less likely to do it than the dominant majority?

To point, in complete ignorance, to a “failure” or lack of “compassion” on the part of Aaron’s relatives, teachers and friends is to blame the other victims of his suicide. I wrote about their reactions because his action threatened to damage hundreds of others along with himself. Their response, far from being “just symbolic gestures,” exemplified the best things about the human spirit-which incidentally include, in every culture, symbols and rituals that express sadness and compassion and that knit a torn community together after a tragedy.

In fact, it is one of the most distinctively human of all expressions, and since the dawn of culture it has helped us to go on in the face of tragedy and loss. “How can we fix all of it?” is indeed a “hard question”, and it will be a welcome day when we can. Meanwhile, let’s show some compassion for the survivors, and admire their twin human abilities to grieve together and go on.

Note: By invitation, I’ve started a blog on the Psychology Today website, and my latest post can be read there or here, although different comments may be  posted there.

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.

Hundreds of students, teachers, administrators, and staff come to the windows. Some of them jump out of first floor classrooms and run to the boy with blankets or fire extinguishers. They subdue him and douse the flames. An ambulance rushes him to the Medical University of South Carolina, where he is stabilized and met by his family, then Medivac-ed to Augusta, where the nearest top-tier burn clinic will care for him. But he is burned over more than two thirds of his body and dies the next day.

This, it became clear, was not an accident but an act of self-inflicted violence and, too, of psychological damage inflicted on family, friends, school-mates, teachers-hundreds of others. But this is not the story of one boy’s anguish; it is the story of the response  to his violent and painful act. And it’s one that all of us, just simply as human beings, can take comfort in and be proud of.

I know the story because my niece is a senior there, and vice president of the Student Council.

Shortly after the ambulance left, stunned teachers and students who had tried to help the boy came back into the school-although one teacher was seen briefly prostrate on the tarmac sobbing. The school was in lockdown for three hours while police investigated, and then returned to its schedule, although students were given the option to leave. Counselors converged on the campus from all over the city.

But throughout the lockdown, students were texting and tweeting, their network awakening like a huge wounded animal, an organism with an adaptive mind of its own. They were already logging comments on the Charleston Post-Courier website, and by the next day two Facebook pages had been created and were brimming with the verbal equivalent of tears. There were some ignorant comments by outsiders about the boy or the school, but most of the messages posted showed compassion, solidarity, and strength.

They also showed affection for the boy, Aaron Williams, a junior in the magnet school. He was known as Boombox Kid because although otherwise quiet, he played his boombox loudly during the changes between classes. That’s the kind of school it is. Aaron was different, but so is everyone else in the school in his or her own way, and they tolerated him as they tolerated each other, skeptically but with respect.

Ater his death they piled flowers on his empty parking spot with the chalked message “We [heart] you,” beside a drawing of a boombox. They stood around it playing music from a real one. They hung a huge poster in the hallway, showing a boombox with two hearts in place of speakers, and the words, “Don’t Stop the Beat.” They lowered the school flag to half mast.

Aaron’s father, an Air Force officer, held a press conference the day after his son’s death. “Our hearts are broken,” he said, “that Aaron was struck with a despair so dark that he could not see beyond it, in spite of the love, support and counseling he received. While his act was in no way a solution to his struggles, the dramatic nature of his death was his attempt to reach out to as many hearts as possible and to emphasize the importance of living lives of love and compassion.”

And Aaron himself left an explanatory message, which his father paraphrased and quoted: Aaron “was suddenly confused and felt unable to help himself. He then expressed his concern for other kids who might be having feelings like he did, and he said he hoped they could be ‘helped in a very confidential manner.’”

The forty-five counselors who came to the school-not just from all over the school system but from MUSC, the Crisis Chaplaincy, and other agencies-were needed. There were grave dangers: a boy at another school in the Charleston area hanged himself the following day, perhaps influenced by the publicity about Aaron.

But when we think about stress, we need to think too about resilience, about the power of the human spirit, including the teenage one, to rise and assert the value of life in the face of even the most tragic challenges. Kids-most kids-are built to lean forward into life. Aaron was not one of those in the end, and many like him can use all the professional help they can get.

Yet for most of his surviving fellow students, that kind of help is an assist to a surge of self-help and collective, spontaneous, mutual support that is in children’s natures and in some ways serves them better than we can. We need to be sure we are harnessing it, not trying to replace it.

On Thursday, when Aaron was still alive, the whole school wore white, a show of solidarity-and the opposite of black. On Friday, after his death, still spurning black, the whole school wore red. It signified, they explained, a beating heart.

The beat goes on.

Note: By invitation, I’ve started a blog on the Psychology Today website, and my latest post can be read there or here, although different comments may be  posted there.

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.

She thought for a few seconds and said, “The country has a lot of ruin in it.” This, I would learn, is an expression dating back at least to Adam Smith, but it took me another conversational turn to see what she meant: that the country is not that easy to ruin; that she had seen worse times, and the country was not ruined yet.

Smith was referring to a country’s riches, but I think Barbara meant a broader kind of wealth, the kind that has allowed us to bear psychological, social and spiritual costs as well as economic ones. I grew up just after World War II, in the shadow of nuclear brinkmanship that could have destroyed the earth not in decades but hours. When I started college I had been to the “I have a dream speech” and many other protests, but I was not by nature optimistic.

There was no Civil Rights Act, no affirmative action, no Medicare or Medicaid. Young women I knew had back alley abortions because there weren’t any other kind, and the number of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, or women with real power in any walk of life was not significantly different from zero.

I saw all that change, and also the end of the Cold War, the spread of democracy, the lifting of two billion people out of the worst kind of poverty. You might say I’m a pessimist who was ambushed by progress. Not that there aren’t setbacks and a huge amount left to be done-just that I now have little doubt it is doable.

The people can be fooled, but not all of the time. They did not believe that Ike was a Communist or that JFK would take orders from the Pope, and they won’t believe all they hear about Obama. They did not really lurch to the right on Tuesday, any more than they lurched to the left four years ago. They moved center-right, restoring the gridlock they often favor. But over time, they are center-left: in each generation they accept as centrist things that seemed left-wing a generation earlier.

If one of the younger people here is standing where I am many years hence, I’m guessing you will find that this has happened again. Not because it is inevitable, but because it is right, and because people like those in the Russell Sage community will be working hard to fulfill Mrs. Sage’s mandate and Dr. King’s dream.

Note: By invitation, I’ve started a blog on the Psychology Today website, and my latest post can be read there or here, although different comments may be  posted there.

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. And it probably always was, for our hunting-and-gathering ancestors.

Let’s say you are pregnant and carrying a three-year-old and thirty pounds of food despite your back pain, or you are challenging someone stronger than you, or you are overly optimistic about driving hyenas away from a carcass so you can steal their meat. If a couple of warning signs send you back to your grass hut with a bad mood on, you live to carry or fight or steal meat another day. If you keep your cocky mood, you may be the meat.

Then too, studies show that depressed moods with their rumination can lead to creative bursts coming out of them, and some of our great leaders–Lincoln, Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt–suffered depression and came back stronger.

Anxiety–which we now know is biologically related to depression–may, in Nesse’s perspective, be a holdover from the pervasive vigilance and wariness that hunter-gatherers may have found essential for survival. For instance, when I lived in !Kung Bushman village-camps, I rarely found anyone sleeping through the night.

Our idea of a good night’s sleep would potentially have been deadly, since the fire would have gone out in front of the hut and the family inside would be vulnerable to lions and hyenas, known at times to attack people in their sleep. So whatever restlessness wakes people up saves lives. Likewise, walking around in the bush while hunting or gathering was no countryside meditative idyll, but a time to be on your guard against predators.

So if generalized anxiety is a pervasive problem of modern life, we might be able to thank our ancestors. This holds true for some symptoms of post-traumatic stress as well. Go through a trauma under evolutionary circumstances–a tussle with a leopard, a bushfire, a losing fight with a rival over a woman–and you may do well to revisit and ruminate over the trauma, at least for a time, and plan how to avoid encounters that might lead to repeating it.

Of course, depression, anxiety, and PTSD can be counterproductive and even debilitating. We don’t need to sit around thinking that we should accept clinical versions of them, just because in some form they may have been adaptive in the past. But there are such things as normal moodswings, and a normal ebb and flow of anxious feelings.

Interestingly, though, in my experience, the !Kung are anxious about things we would recognize. Am I going to be able to continue to feed my family? Is my sister still one of my best friends, or is she pulling away emotionally?–among hunter-gatherers, because of sharing, this question is related to the first. Is the baby’s fever one that comes and goes, or one that will get worse and take her away? And of course: Were those innocent glances my wife and that guy visiting from another band exchanged across the fire, or were they something I need to worry about?

These sorts of things cause anxiety in any culture. Each culture also has its physical dangers, but the !Kung dealt with them much as we deal with the risk of fire in our homes or fatalities on our roads–not by ruminating, but by taking precautions.

And we also owe our hunter-gatherer ancestors a lot of our happiness. Positive psychologists have shown that most people incline toward happiness rather than sadness or even neutrality; most of us, moment to moment, are glad to be alive. So are hunter-gatherers, despite having lives that are much harder than ours. If they weren’t, they couldn’t do what they have to do–and did remarkably well for the many thousands of years that enabled us to be their living legacy.

We also owe them a lot of our resilience. One of the worst ideas in some past versions of psychodynamic psychology is that every bad thing that happens leaves an indelible mark on our minds, impairing us in some enduring way. The reality is that most trauma results in transient symptoms–resilience usually wins the day. Why?

Because if we hadn’t adapted ourselves to hard knocks during evolution, we wouldn’t have survived a single generation, much less hundreds of millennia. We take some things to heart; we grieve; we are afraid. Sometimes we have intrinsic  emotional problems that require psychotherapy or medicine. But more often than not we bounce back, because that is what our evolution built into our psyches–the rebirth of positive mood, the hopeful gaze at the horizon, the leaning into the wind, the determined step forward into the future.

Note: By invitation, I’ve started a blog on the Psychology Today website, and my latest post can be read there or here, although different comments may be  posted there.

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.

The Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, defined it as “using the blessings of the world for the benefit of all…None of us can be truly happy unless all are happy.” If she’s right about that, then, alas, none of us is truly happy. But she clarified this a bit, making it more attainable: “In the reign of God, when God rules, when all are in right relationships, we will find the greatest happiness.”

She also said she is “struck that happiness is both physical and mental. In Christianity, bodies are of utmost importance. The incarnation teaches us that our bodies are a blessing. Part of happiness is having our bodily needs satisfied. Having enough to eat, having shelter, having meaningful work.” And yet we understand, “that all existence is a prayer, that there are blessings in each moment of the day. Washing the dishes, putting the body to work, all is a blessing. The simple awareness of God’s presence in every moment, every encounter, every challenge is happiness.”

The Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, joked at one point that when you study Jewish literature and history, “happiness is not the first word that comes to mind.” But he noted that there are two Hebrew words for happiness: osher, which refers to a kind of individual happiness, and simcha, which is the happiness shared with others-the latter being the best and most important.

He also defined what happiness isn’t: “We spend money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to make us happy.” But far from increasing happiness, this is “the most efficient way to manufacture and distribute unhappiness. If I have a certain amount of money and power and give some to you, I have less. If I have love and happiness and give some to you, I have more. Spiritual happiness is the world’s greatest renewable energy.”

This sounded a bit like a song learned in preschool: Like a “magic penny,” “Love is something, if you give it away, you end up having more.” But then, it’s been aptly said that everything important we need to know, we learned in kindergarten.

The Islamic scholar, Prof. Seyyed Hossein Nasr of George Washington University, also immediately delved deeper than any notion about mood or pleasure. He pointed out that the Arabic word for “beauty” is the same as the word for “virtue” or “moral goodness,” with the implication that this is where happiness lies.

He also said that in the Quran, the word for happiness “is identified with the state of paradise. We never leave the pursuit of happiness, which in itself means that we are not really made for this world alone. Every happiness that we seek outside of spiritual happiness comes to an end, and the ending is always sadness.” In contrast to this pursuit, life’s main goal is self-discovery. “Once we know who we are, we are happy. But very few people in the world know who they are.”

The Dalai Lama must surely be among them. Krista Tippett of National Public Radio was the moderator, and she asked him how he can be happy while he and the Tibetan people are suffering. “Of course, my life wasn’t easy,” he said. “We lost our country. It’s sad, but that brings different and new opportunities.” Happiness can come out of tragedy, and “our life depends on hope, hope for better…Happiness does not come from the sky. Happiness must be created within us and our family.”

Although one thinks of Tibetan Buddhism as suggesting that happiness comes from within, through individual meditation and the overcoming of suffering, the Dalai Lama’s view that “happiness must be created within us and our family” suggests more, and it seems to correspond to both forms of happiness that Rabbi Sacks alluded to.

Surely the Dalai Lama’s ability to encourage and spread happiness among his own and other peoples suggests a convergence with Bishop Schori’s “right relationships” and Prof. Nasr’s “moral goodness.” As Rabbi Sacks said, directly addressing the Dalai Lama, “If we could only learn one thing from you, which is how to laugh the way you do, I think we’d increase the happiness in the world,”

Or as Helen Keller put it, “Life is full of suffering, but it is also full of the overcoming of it.” From the hands of a great soul who was both blind and deaf in her body, the core of the secret we are all seeking.

Note: By invitation, I’ve started a blog on the Psychology Today website, and my latest post can be read there or here, although different comments may be  posted there.

Picture a fire in an otherwise pitch-dark cave, or outside on a still plain on a moonless, starry night. Drop the temperature a bit, perhaps, and add the distant wail of a coyote or some wild dogs. Now add the most important ingredient: four or seven or ten people sitting around the fire talking, with babies or young children sleeping on some of their backs or laps. Extend the scene long into the night.

Thus the nub of the social network, circa 10,000 years ago, and for a couple of hundred thousand years before that. Hunter-gatherer bands consisted of a small number of people, 30 or so on average, mostly related through direct or indirect blood or marital ties. The number could fluctuate upward when a resource was limited-say, water in the dry season-or downward when prey animals were dispersing. The group could also split for social reasons-one way of resolving conflict-and reaggregate as before, or expand again with somewhat changed membership. The band might also move as a whole. But for a few weeks or months at least, these would be the people you saw and talked with every day.

Beyond these fluctuating, mobile bands would be a wider social world of perhaps 500 people you would likely know by name and sight. You would be related to some of them, more distantly on average than to those in your band, and you would think of some of them as people who could help you in bad times, perhaps connect you up with a mate or be there for your children, and even perhaps one day find yourself around the fire with in the same band, talking.

What does this pattern have in common with twenty-first century social networks based on media like Facebook and Twitter? A lot, in my view.

I first heard about Facebook when only college kid had access; I thought, great, they deserve their own social world. But when it opened up to all kinds of people of all ages, although I certainly saw the dangers, I also saw the opportunity. I saw it again in the film, The Social Network , the other evening. The film doesn’t strike me as the masterwork it’s been touted as, but it’s very entertaining. I have no idea whether Zuckerberg, Facebook’s creator, is the autism-spectrum solipcist he’s portrayed as in the movie. I doubt it. But that’s not the idea that matters.

It’s the idea of a private social network of your own choosing, connected to endless other similar networks, and it’s no wonder it spread like wildfire. There was and is a human hunger for contact, and this seemed to be a new kind of contact. The pictures, the personal news, the sharing of griefs and celebrations, the expression of feelings have of course been done for generations, but not instantaneously at a distance.

You now got to choose your own hunter-gatherer band, and your own network of "friends" beyond it. With the advent of multiple levels of privacy, intimacy can be nested in concentric circles just as it was for scores of thousands of years on the African plains. It’s just that it no longer depends on geography, and you have a lot more choice. Whether you are gay, vegan, a kick-boxer, a Baptist-turned-Buddhist, or all those things, you can find and build a network of people like yourself.

But of course, the "friends" of choice often include family, and that part of the network resembles the one from 10,000 years ago. So, for example, I’m friended by all my kids, my stepdaughter, a number of their friends, my wife, our neices and nephews, present and former students, and many of our contemporaries. I don’t spend much time on Facebook myself, but that’s partly because my wife-a smart psychologist and a very loving person-uses her insomnia to follow all those people.

The upshot is she has known immediately when some of them needed help, when some of them started new relationships or saw old ones foundering, when this one had a cold or that one was drinking too much, and it didn’t matter whether they were under our roof or thousands of miles away. Carefully, to be sure, she and I have sometimes responded to what we have learned in this way, sometimes we have only watched and waited.

But the point is we have known so much more than we could have known a decade ago, and we’ve known it in real time. We’re not snooping, because we’ve been admitted or even invited, and we can participate in new ways. With Twitter and its melding with Facebook, the day-to-day becomes moment-to-moment. The exchange becomes more and more a conversation, and the pictures make it almost seem face-to-face.

Are there dangers? To be sure. Impostors are everywhere, and some are dangerous. Another (in my view better) film, Catfish , depicts the emotional consequences of one very sad hoax, and it can get much worse than that. Pimps and other predators are out there finding children. Some people delude themselves that they are "friends" with thousands.

But all advances have a cost. We have entered a new age of social networks that in some ways takes us back to our original adaptation, the day by day and night by night interactions with those we care about, and who care about us, and the opportunity to share their lives.

Note: By invitation, I’ve started a blog on the Psychology Today website, and my latest post can be read there or here, although different comments may be  posted there.

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 might be called inattentive or hyperactive in a classroom setting.

The answer, I think, is not none, but very few—certainly fewer than the three to six percent who get diagnosed in American schools. My friend Peter Gray has posted on this discrepancy, which he learned about by interviewing fieldworkers who had studied hunter-gatherers. In anthropology we call it the discordance or “mismatch” model. We as humans evolved in a certain context—the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. This crucible formed our genes.

Then most of us entered a completely different environment, that of settled agriculture, a mere 10,000 years ago. But let’s say that’s enough time for some genetic change. We then shoved ourselves into yet another, even more different environment, the modern industrial/postindustrial state. No way our genes could have changed fast enough to adapt. The mismatch between genes and environment has brought us big increases in obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, some cancers, and even dental caries—“diseases of civilization.”

Is ADHD one of them? There are reasons to say yes. First, some forty percent of kids diagnosed with it have had pressure from teachers to get evaluation and treatment, and this is by far the most common source of referrals. These kids stick out like sore thumbs in classrooms where you have to sit still all day, pay attention continuously to activities you haven’t chosen, and remember pesky details on command.

It’s not that hunter-gatherer children and adults didn’t have to concentrate intensely, control restlessness, and remember many fine details, they did. No man could succeed as a hunter who couldn’t keep still and quiet, no woman could feed her family without a prodigious memory for the details of a landscape and the appearance of countless edible plants in all seasons. Survival depended on doing these things well.

But they did them in the course of moving around in a vast, wild world they felt comfortable in, and when they stopped to focus in utter silence on a kudu’s trail or match a slim brown vine on a bush with the retrieved memory of an underground succulent root, these skills were part of the natural course of a day’s events, moving through the savanna, responding appropriately to compelling stimuli as they arose.

There was no question in this world as to the relevance of what they needed to do, even for children. There was no years-long slog through sedentary activities many of which seemed irrelevant to life. There was no call to trade a huge part of your childhood for a future return that was difficult to imagine. Play merged with learning to survive.

So many of the children who would now be diagnosed with ADHD or at least ADD would have gotten a pass, and some of our academic stars would have been worse off—enjoying sitting still rather than getting up and moving for instance, or ignoring a stray distraction in the stimulus envelope that might turn out to be dinner or a leopard.

To be sure, the kid who is proverbially bouncing off the walls or unable to focus attention even for short periods would be poorly adapted in any culture, even one without walls. But most kids who get the diagnosis in our culture would be fine—normal. There’s a bell-shaped curve of genetic tendency toward inattentiveness and overactivity, and the modern world lops off a much bigger chunk of one tail and deems it maladapted than would have been the case for our ancestors.

Still, we do want our kids to adapt to our culture. Both medical and behavioral treatments for ADHD have proven themselves, and the diagnosis is not a plot to control rebellious kids and adults (One paradox is that non-Hispanic whites are more likely to get treated than Hispanic or African-American kids.)

But we also need to think about the environment. Alternative schools with open classrooms have been around for decades and have allowed children to learn in ways that are more like the hunter-gatherer world we evolved in.

Meanwhile, No Child Left Behind with its relentless narrow testing programs, combined with an economic downturn, have caused schools throughout the country to abolish recess, cut way back on art and music, and dismantle playgrounds. It’s not rocket science to predict an increase in ADHD. We’re just making the mismatch worse.

Note: By invitation, I’ve started a blog on the Psychology Today website, and my latest post can be read there or here, although different comments may be  posted there. This one produced some strong reactions .

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:

“Find out how much sex your wife really wants to have…Let’s say she says once a week. And…your ideal is five times a week. Don’t worry about that discrepancy…she is still imagining herself wanting sex. Good! Your focus can now be to shift your expectations …down to once per week, perhaps masturbating the other four nights, and looking forward to trying to make that one time with her excellent for both of you.”

Not exactly what I would call meeting halfway, but at least a dose of realism, too much for some readers. But chores and childcare can be divided equally, or men can do more of them, the average heterosexual couple will still have a lot more “not tonight dear”s on the woman’s side than the man’s. Men’s anger and frustration came through in the comments, as did women’s.

No wonder, given Kelly’s vignette: “You’re lying next to your wife after a long day for both of you. You catch a whiff of her freshly washed hair and suddenly your mind jumps to how nice it would be to get her naked. You know she’s wearing those not-tonight flannel pajamas, but you slide your hand over her closer breast anyhow as you press your hips against her.”

I guess I could think of a lamer approach, but it would take some time. One comment was, “Um…this dude’s seduction tactics just sucked” and went on to say, “Maybe if he started off by holding his wife and kissing her first, she wouldn’t be so reluctant. Dude has got to bring his game if he’s looking to initiate!”

Kelly promised another posting with a secret solution, but that was even lamer. It was just Masters and Johnson’s treatment for sexual dysfunction, which is to swear off intercourse, orgasm, and genital contact (Kelly calls it “reverse psychology”) while you touch each other for long periods. This is a good clinical intervention but is neither helpful nor needed for the average marriage.

“Dude has got to bring his game”? It’s not a game. It’s love, friendship, commitment, and yes, lust too, and disappointment and frustration and hurt and regret and forgiveness and healing. If it isn’t all that, especially the love, commitment, and forgiveness, it’s probably time for the lawyers.

So where does the lust go and the seduction come in?

It’s in the play of eyes over hours and days. It’s a hug and a touch and a kiss whenever possible, including in front of the kids. It’s a certain smile from across the room at a party you’re ready to leave. It’s a furtive touch that is not lewd but is still somehow one that would not be exchanged with anyone else.
This is the ebb and flow of desire in marriage, sex in friendship, lust in love. Have code words to use in the morning that set up day-long expectations for the night, but be prepared in real life for it not to go as planned. Somehow, find a way to occasionally have daytime sex. You’d manage if you were having an affair. Have it with her.

Want oral sex? Obviously, you also offer it. If she’d rather have a massage, don’t get obsessed with tit-for-tat, it’s not that simple-although in fairness you can expect to put a lot more time into the massage than she puts into the you-know-what. If the massage relaxes her and makes her feel sexual, great; if not, you can live to get it on another day.

When you do get to sex, don’t neglect her clitoris. It’s the only human organ evolved for the sole purpose of pleasure, and your life will be better if you are thoroughly acquainted with it. Your penis is well-designed by nature for making babies; making sure she fully enjoys sex is not usually a job it can do all by itself.

And yes, doing your share of the chores and more can be the best foreplay-if you haven’t figured that out you haven’t been paying attention. Tell her to take a bath while you do the dishes. If she has a crush on some TV guy, tell her to watch him.

But women need to know: in most couples he needs sex more than you. When he doesn’t get it he doesn’t just feel frustrated, he feels rejected and uncared-for. It’s one of the reasons he married you. It calms him and takes the edge off masculine resentment. Trust me: the way to a man’s heart is not through his stomach.

Above all, don’t expect him to become like you, any more than you can become like him. If you’re heterosexual, get used to it: you’re doomed to spend your life with someone who functions quite differently. Learn the mysteries of that other class of person-plus of course all the individual mysteries of whoever it is you married-and you can find out why some of us think marriage is pretty great.

And by the way, when the mood is right, flannel pajamas can be pretty damn sexy.

*”Wife-Wooing” is the title of a very nice story by John Updike; titles are not copyrightable, but you can consider this a sort of homage.

Note: By invitation, I’ve started a blog on the Psychology Today website, and my latest post can be read there or here, although different comments may be  posted there.

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 where you want to draw the line. Pick any BMI number and you’ll see more Americans above it every year. This includes children and teens, who are showing up in pediatricians’ offices in growing numbers with Type II diabetes, which used to be called “adult-onset.” In some practices there are more of them than there are of Type I, once called childhood diabetes.

Don’t want to call it an epidemic of obesity? Fine. Endemic, pervasive, skyrocketing, steeply increasing, whatever. Anyone who’s telling these kids that it’s okay and they should feed good about their bodies is doing them and the country a huge disservice. They are headed for diabetes, heart disease, colon cancer, arthritis, and many other conditions in record number. Help them with their body image issues, but don’t tell them it’s fine to be fat.

But why this trend? Isn’t it maladaptive? In evolutionary terms, the answer is simple. Not just for millions but for hundreds of millions of years our ancestors were selected to store fat during times of abundance. That way, you could survive lean times. Trouble is, now there’s no end to abundance.

Among the Bushmen of Botswana, who I lived with for two years, and other hunter-gatherers, there was no starvation but there was also no obesity. Foods were harder to get, eat, and digest, and they maintained a high level of aerobic and muscular fitness just because of activity in the food quest. Compared to our diet , theirs was much higher in fiber and much lower in refined carbs, saturated fat, and salt. Children were always outdoors and active.

Our genes and bodies evolved in that context, and they just can’t handle what we do to them now.

Culture matters, of course. My colleague Peter Brown and I many years ago looked at the ideal of beauty in cultures throughout the anthropological record. Plumpness is the ideal in over 80 percent. Look at paintings by Rubens, Titian, and Tintoretto, and you’ll see the women who were considered the greatest beauties of their time. Other eras have prized less plump women, but few thin enough to make Playboy, much less Vogue.

Slim was the ideal in a few cultures, very fat in none. Pleasantly plump but not obese was the goal in most, and the extra fat those beauties stored held just about the extra energy they would have needed to get through a pregnancy and a couple of years of lactation. In other words, they were beautiful because they could make and nourish a baby.

In some cultures in the past, frank obesity was evidently valued. Carvings like the “Venuses” of the late Stone Age looked like women with very high BMIs, possibly also pregnant. Some cultures in Africa had fattening huts for adolescent girls to prepare them for marriage. In many cultures you displayed your wealth and status by showing you could put on surplus fat. But it stopped with pleasantly plump, probably because serious signs of ill health became evident when you went further.

But we live in the Supersize Culture, which is producing a legion of boys and girls, men and women, who are far fatter than the plumpness that used to be (and in much of the world still is) the norm. Yet ironically ours is a culture with a cosmetic ideal that’s uniquely thin. It’s not a health ideal; mortality is lowest at a BMI of 22 or 23, which you would never see in a typical fashion ad. And at its worst the ideal leads to anorexia or bulimia.

Those are bad, sometimes deadly disorders, but the implications for the population are far more dire at the other end of the BMI spectrum. And like most bad things, the trend is worst for the poor. Our society consigns the poor to put on weight by making it hard and expensive to get good food and easy and cheap to get junk.

The trend affects Blacks (especially women) more than Whites, in part because of culture but mainly because of access. You can’t find fresh fruit and vegetables in the inner city, and you don’t want your kids playing outside on streets rife with drugs and gunfire. You’re struggling to keep body and soul together, so when your kid sits for hours watching TV and eating snacks, you’ve got bigger worries than BMI.

But it’s up to us as a society to recognize that there is more going on here than lack of will power. The human species was set up to store fat whenever possible and to resist weight loss with many fail-safe appetite mechanisms. And for very good evolutionary reasons, it’s even harder to keep weight off than to lose it.

So we’d better rethink our laws, school food policies, farm subsidies, educational programs, and information campaigns before we have to change our name to Homo lipidens.

Note: By invitation, I’ve started a blog on the Psychology Today website , and my latest post can be read there or here, although different comments may be  posted there.