🟢Why you should shop at your local farmers market?

It's been about a decade since the last financial crisis, yet this industry has never been bigger. Legislation that was meant to better regulate its largest players has hurt its smaller ones, resulting in most of the industry's assets to be controlled by the top one percent. They've become too big to fail. I'm not referring to big banks, but the world of Big Agriculture.
As a public health practitioner who has worked with small-scale farmers in Rwanda and now as a small food business owner who sits at the intersection between our consumers and producers, I've been exposed to one of the most ecologically and economically intensive industries in the world, and throughout my work, I've witnessed a chilling irony. Our farmers, who feed our communities, cannot afford the very foods they grow. Today, a handful of corporations continue to consolidate the entire food supply chain, from the intellectual property of seeds to produce and livestock all the way to the financial institutions who lend to these farmers. And the recent results have been rising bankruptcies for family farms and little control for those who are just trying to survive in the industry. Left unchecked, we will head into another economic collapse, one very similar to the farm crisis of the 1980s, when commodity market prices crashed, interest rates doubled, and many farmers lost everything.
Fortunately, there's a very simple, three-part solution you can be part of right now to help us transform our food industry from the bottom up.
Step one: shop at your local farmers markets.
Buying from your local market and subscribing to a community-supported agricultural produce box, better known as a CSA, may be the single greatest purchasing decision you can make as a consumer today. Last year, American farmers made the least they have in almost three decades, because they now own fewer parts of the supply chain than ever before. Under exclusive contracts with Big Ag and big box stores, farmers are not offered a fair price for their goods. In fact, the average farmer in America makes less than 15 cents of every dollar on a product that you purchase at a store. On the other hand, farmers who sell their goods at a farmers market take home closer to 90 cents of every dollar. But beyond taking home a larger share, farmers use markets as an opportunity to cultivate the next generation of agriculturalists who shepherd our farmlands and our pastures. In our fight against climate change, we need them now more than ever to promote and preserve diverse land use.
When multigenerational farms are lost to Big Ag consolidation, our communities suffer in countless ways. Rural America has now jumped above the national average in violent crime. Three out four farmworkers surveyed have been directly impacted by our opioid epidemic. Now oftentimes disguised as accidents, farmer suicide is now on the rise.
Step two: shop at your local farmers markets.
Produce from a large retail store is harvested before it's ripe to travel more than a thousand miles before it ultimately sits on your shelf roughly two weeks later. Alternatively, because most farmers markets have proximity and production requirements, farmers travel less than 50 miles to offer you local produce with minimal packaging waste. With the advent of online grocers and trending meal kits, consumers are increasingly disconnected with their farmers and the economics of food production. Since the rise of the smartphone revolution, direct-to-consumer goods have stagnated.

While local and sustainable foods have been trending for almost a decade, terms like "healthy" and "natural" have no legal framework in the United States. Your best bet for fresh, nutrient-rich foods without the marketing jargon? Go to your farmers market. Buying local is not a new idea, but turning it into a habit in today's world still is. If we want to avoid the high costs of cheap food, protect our environment, rebuild our communities and save our farmers -- literally -- we're going to need to vote with our food purchases. The success of our food systems is directly attached to us. If we want to break up Big Ag's hold on our food supply chain, then we're going to need to connect with our farmers. We're going to need to rebuild relationships with the hands that feed us three times a day. Plus, two more for snacks. Come on.
With a government online database of more than 8,600 farmers markets across the country, you can easily find the nearest one to you. Just think of yourself as an investor in food, where your purchasing power helps create a more equitable society for everyone. Oh!
Almost forgot step three, which may surprise you: shop at your local farmers markets.
Thank you.

#Farming #Agriculture #Food #Future #Environment #Business #Sustainability

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💥این ویدیو رو ببین تا متوجه شی چرا فنلاند شادترین کشور دنیاست!👇🏻👇🏻

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🟢If a story moves you, act on it

#Activism #Africa #Communication #Collaboration #Community #Empathy #Humanity #Journalism

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🟢If a story moves you, act on it

So earlier this year, I was informed that I would be doing a TED Talk. So I was excited, then I panicked, then I was excited, then I panicked, and in between the excitement and the panicking, I started to do my research, and my research primarily consisted of Googling how to give a great TED Talk.
And interspersed with that, I was Googling Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. How many of you know who that is?
So I was Googling her because I always Google her because I'm just a fan, but also because she always has important and interesting things to say. And the combination of those searches kept leading me to her talk on the dangers of a single story, on what happens when we have a solitary lens through which to understand certain groups of people, and it is the perfect talk. It's the talk that I would have given if I had been famous first.
You know, and you know, like, she's African and I'm African, and she's a feminist and I'm a feminist, and she's a storyteller and I'm a storyteller, so I really felt like it's my talk.
So I decided that I was going to learn how to code, and then I was going to hack the internet and I would take down all the copies of that talk that existed, and then I would memorize it, and then I would come here and deliver it as if it was my own speech. So that plan was going really well, except the coding part, and then one morning a few months ago, I woke up to the news that the wife of a certain presidential candidate had given a speech that —
that sounded eerily like a speech given by one of my other faves, Michelle Obama.
And so I decided that I should probably write my own TED Talk, and so that is what I am here to do. I'm here to talk about my own observations about storytelling. I want to talk to you about the power of stories, of course, but I also want to talk about their limitations, particularly for those of us who are interested in social justice.
So since Adichie gave that talk seven years ago, there has been a boom in storytelling. Stories are everywhere, and if there was a danger in the telling of one tired old tale, then I think there has got to be lots to celebrate about the flourishing of so many stories and so many voices. Stories are the antidote to bias. In fact, today, if you are middle class and connected via the internet, you can download stories at the touch of a button or the swipe of a screen. You can listen to a podcast about what it's like to grow up Dalit in Kolkata. You can hear an indigenous man in Australia talk about the trials and triumphs of raising his children in dignity and in pride. Stories make us fall in love. They heal rifts and they bridge divides. Stories can even make it easier for us to talk about the deaths of people in our societies who don't matter, because they make us care. Right?

I'm not so sure, and I actually work for a place called the Centre for Stories. And my job is to help to tell stories that challenge mainstream narratives about what it means to be black or a Muslim or a refugee or any of those other categories that we talk about all the time. But I come to this work after a long history as a social justice activist, and so I'm really interested in the ways that people talk about nonfiction storytelling as though it's about more than entertainment, as though it's about being a catalyst for social action. It's not uncommon to hear people say that stories make the world a better place. Increasingly, though, I worry that even the most poignant stories, particularly the stories about people who no one seems to care about, can often get in the way of action towards social justice. Now, this is not because storytellers mean any harm. Quite the contrary. Storytellers are often do-gooders like me and, I suspect, yourselves. And the audiences of storytellers are often deeply compassionate and empathetic people. Still, good intentions can have unintended consequences, and so I want to propose that stories are not as magical as they seem. So three — because it's always got to be three — three reasons why I think that stories don't necessarily make the world a better place.
Firstly, stories can create an illusion of solidarity. There is nothing like that feel-good factor you get from listening to a fantastic story where you feel like you climbed that mountain, right, or that you befriended that death row inmate. But you didn't. You haven't done anything. Listening is an important but insufficient step towards social action.
Secondly, I think often we are drawn towards characters and protagonists who are likable and human. And this makes sense, of course, right? Because if you like someone, then you care about them. But the inverse is also true. If you don't like someone, then you don't care about them. And if you don't care about them, you don't have to see yourself as having a moral obligation to think about the circumstances that shaped their lives.
I learned this lesson when I was 14 years old. I learned that actually, you don't have to like someone to recognize their wisdom, and you certainly don't have to like someone to take a stand by their side. So my bike was stolen while I was riding it —
which is possible if you're riding slowly enough, which I was.
So one minute I'm cutting across this field in the Nairobi neighborhood where I grew up, and it's like a very bumpy path, and so when you're riding a bike, you don't want to be like, you know —
And so I'm going like this, slowly pedaling, and all of a sudden, I'm on the floor. I'm on the ground, and I look up, and there's this kid peddling away in the getaway vehicle, which is my bike, and he's about 11 or 12 years old, and I'm on the floor, and I'm crying because I saved a lot of money for that bike, and I'm crying and I stand up and I start screaming. Instinct steps in, and I start screaming, "Mwizi, mwizi!" which means "thief" in Swahili. And out of the woodworks, all of these people come out and they start to give chase. This is Africa, so mob justice in action. Right? And I round the corner, and they've captured him, they've caught him. The suspect has been apprehended, and they make him give me my bike back, and they also make him apologize. Again, you know, typical African justice, right? And so they make him say sorry. And so we stand there facing each other, and he looks at me, and he says sorry, but he looks at me with this unbridled fury. He is very, very angry. And it is the first time that I have been confronted with someone who doesn't like me simply because of what I represent. He looks at me with this look as if to say, "You, with your shiny skin and your bike, you're angry at me?"

So it was a hard lesson that he didn't like me, but you know what, he was right. I was a middle-class kid living in a poor country. I had a bike, and he barely had food. Sometimes, it's the messages that we don't want to hear, the ones that make us want to crawl out of ourselves, that we need to hear the most. For every lovable storyteller who steals your heart, there are hundreds more whose voices are slurred and ragged, who don't get to stand up on a stage dressed in fine clothes like this. There are a million angry-boy-on-a-bike stories and we can't afford to ignore them simply because we don't like their protagonists or because that's not the kid that we would bring home with us from the orphanage.
The third reason that I think that stories don't necessarily make the world a better place is that too often we are so invested in the personal narrative that we forget to look at the bigger picture. And so we applaud someone when they tell us about their feelings of shame, but we don't necessarily link that to oppression. We nod understandingly when someone says they felt small, but we don't link that to discrimination. The most important stories, especially for social justice, are those that do both, that are both personal and allow us to explore and understand the political.
But it's not just about the stories we like versus the stories we choose to ignore. Increasingly, we are living in a society where there are larger forces at play, where stories are actually for many people beginning to replace the news. Yeah? We live in a time where we are witnessing the decline of facts, when emotions rule and analysis, it's kind of boring, right? Where we value what we feel more than what we actually know. A recent report by the Pew Center on trends in America indicates that only 10 percent of young adults under the age of 30 "place a lot of trust in the media." Now, this is significant. It means that storytellers are gaining trust at precisely the same moment that many in the media are losing the confidence in the public. This is not a good thing, because while stories are important and they help us to have insights in many ways, we need the media. From my years as a social justice activist, I know very well that we need credible facts from media institutions combined with the powerful voices of storytellers. That's what pushes the needle forward in terms of social justice.
In the final analysis, of course, it is justice that makes the world a better place, not stories. Right? And so if it is justice that we are after, then I think we mustn't focus on the media or on storytellers. We must focus on audiences, on anyone who has ever turned on a radio or listened to a podcast, and that means all of us.
So a few concluding thoughts on what audiences can do to make the world a better place. So firstly, the world would be a better place, I think, if audiences were more curious and more skeptical and asked more questions about the social context that created those stories that they love so much. Secondly, the world would be a better place if audiences recognized that storytelling is intellectual work. And I think it would be important for audiences to demand more buttons on their favorite websites, buttons for example that say, "If you liked this story, click here to support a cause your storyteller believes in." Or "click here to contribute to your storyteller's next big idea." Often, we are committed to the platforms, but not necessarily to the storytellers themselves. And then lastly, I think that audiences can make the world a better place by switching off their phones, by stepping away from their screens and stepping out into the real world beyond what feels safe.
Alice Walker has said, "Look closely at the present you are constructing. It should look like the future you are dreaming." Storytellers can help us to dream, but it's up to all of us to have a plan for justice.

#Activism #Africa #Communication #Collaboration #Community #Empathy #Humanity #Journalism

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❄️اگه میخوای واکنش آب جوش رو در هوای منفی ۱۸ درجه بدونی این ویدیو رو ببین👇🏻👇🏻

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🟢What's normal anxiety -- and what's an anxiety disorder?

#Psychology #Biology #Brain #Mental_Health #Neuroscience #Human_Body

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🟢What's normal anxiety -- and what's an anxiety disorder?

We live in a culture that doesn't take mental health issues seriously. There's a lot of stigma. Some people tell you to just suck it up, or get it together, or to stop worrying, or that it's all in your head. But I'm here to tell you that anxiety disorders, they're as real as diabetes.
Hi again. It's Dr. Jen, and I've noticed something with my patients. They often describe to me some classic symptoms of an anxiety disorder. Constant worry, trouble sleeping, tense muscles and struggle with concentrating. But they aren't getting treatment.
There's a lot of issues with mental-health care in this country. Some people don't have insurance that would cover it. Some have been dismissed or minimized in the past, and don't think seeking help will do any good. Some worry about the stigma and whether it could affect future jobs or relationships. But severe anxiety isn't a moral or personal failing. It's a health problem, just like strep throat or diabetes. It needs to be treated with the same kind of seriousness.
Before we can talk about anxiety disorders, let's talk about anxiety itself. Anxiety is the very real and normal emotion we feel in a stressful situation. It's related to fear. But while fear is a response to an immediate threat that quickly subsides, anxiety is a response to more uncertain threats that tends to last much longer. It's all part of the threat detection system, which all animals have to some degree, to help protect us from predators. Anxiety starts in the brain's amygdala, a pair of almond-sized nerve bundles that alert other areas of the brain to be ready for defensive action. Next, the hypothalamus relays the signal, setting off what we call the stress response in our body. Our muscles tense, our breathing and heart rate increase and our blood pressure rises. Areas in the brain stem kick in and put you in a state of high alertness. This is the fight-or-flight response.
There are ways the fight-or-flight response is kept somewhat in check, with an area of higher-level thinking called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. It works like this. If a person sees something they think is dangerous, like a tiger, that sends a signal to the amygdala, saying "it's time to run." The ventromedial prefrontal cortex can say to the amygdala, "Hey, look. The tiger's in a cage. You know what a cage is? They can't escape from a cage. It's OK to calm down." It's a feedback loop that can help keep the response in check. The hippocampus is also involved. It provides context, saying things like, "Hey, we've seen tigers in cages before. We're in a zoo. You are extra safe."
With anxiety, these threat-detection systems and mechanisms that reduce or inhibit them are functioning incorrectly and cause us to worry about the future and our safety in it. But for many people, it goes into overdrive. They experience persistent pervasive anxiety that disrupts work, school and relationships and leads them to avoid situations that may trigger symptoms. Anxiety disorders are not at all uncommon. Based on data from the World Mental Health Survey, researchers estimate that about 16 percent of individuals currently have or have had an anxiety disorder. These include social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia and phobias. Studies have shown that people with anxiety disorders don't just have a different way of reacting to stress. There may be actual differences in how their brain is working.
One model describes possible mix-ups in the connections between the amygdala and other parts of the brain. The pathways that signal anxiety become stronger. And the more anxiety you have, the stronger the pathways become, and it becomes a vicious cycle.

The good news is there's treatment for anxiety, and that you don't have to suffer. Remember, this isn't about weakness. It's about changing brain patterns, and research shows that our brains have the ability to reorganize and form new connections all throughout our lives. A good first step is to do the basics. Eat a balanced diet, exercise regularly and get plenty of sleep, as your mind is part of your body. It might also help to try meditation. Instead of our heart rate rising and our body tensing, with mindfulness and breathing, we can slow down the fight-or-flight response and improve how we feel in the moment. Cognitive behavioral therapy, a form of talk therapy, can also be fantastic. In it, you learn to identify upsetting thoughts and determine whether they're realistic. Over time, cognitive behavioral therapy can rebuild those neural pathways that tamp down the anxiety response. Medication can also give relief, in both the short-term and the long-term. In the short-term, anti-anxiety drugs can down-regulate the threat-detection mechanisms that are going into overdrive. Studies have shown that both long-term medications and cognitive behavioral therapy can reduce that overreactivity of the amygdala we see an anxiety disorders.
High blood pressure and diabetes, they can be treated or managed over time. And the same is true for an anxiety disorder too.

#Psychology #Biology #Brain #Mental_Health #Neuroscience #Human_Body

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🟢How to make a splash in social media?

#Internet #Animals #Business #Culture #Entertainment #Entrepreneur #Ocean

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🟢How to make a splash in social media?

There are a lot of web 2.0 consultants who make a lot of money. In fact, they make their living on this stuff. I'm going to try to save you all the time and money and go through it in the next three minutes, so bear with me. Started a website in 2005 with a few friends, called Reddit.com. It's what you'd call a social news website;
basically, the democratic front page of the best stuff on the web. You find some interesting content -- say, a TED Talk -- submit it to Reddit, and a community of your peers votes up if they like it, down if they don't. That creates the front page. It's always rising, falling; a half million people visit every day. But this isn't about Reddit. It's about discovering new things that pop up on the web. In the last four years, we've seen all kinds of memes, all kinds of trends get born right on our front page.
This isn't about Reddit itself, it's actually about humpback whales. Well, technically, it's about Greenpeace, an environmental organization that wanted to stop the Japanese government's whaling campaign. The whales were getting killed; they wanted to put an end to it. One of the ways they wanted to do it was to put a tracking chip inside one of the whales. But to personify the movement, they wanted to name it.
So in true web fashion, they put together a poll, where they had a bunch of very erudite, very thoughtful, cultured names. I believe this is the Farsi word for "immortal." I think this means "divine power of the ocean" in a Polynesian language. And then there was this: "Mister Splashy Pants."
And this was a special name. Mister Pants, or "Splashy" to his friends, was very popular on the Internet. In fact, someone on Reddit thought, "What a great thing, we should all vote this up." And Redditors responded and all agreed. So the voting started. We got behind it ourselves; we changed our logo for the day, from the alien to Splashy, to help the cause. And it wasn't long before other sites like Fark and Boing Boing and the rest of the Internet started saying, "We love Splashy Pants!"
So it went from about five percent, which was when this meme started, to 70 percent at the end of voting. Pretty impressive, right? We won! Mister Splashy Pants was chosen. Just kidding -- Greenpeace actually wasn't that crazy about it, because they wanted one of the more thoughtful names to win. They said, "No, just kidding. We'll give it another week of voting."
Well, that got us a little angry, so we changed it to Fightin' Splashy.
And the Reddit community -- really, the rest of the Internet, really got behind this. Facebook groups were created. Facebook applications were created. The idea was, "Vote your conscience, vote for Mister Splashy Pants." People were putting up signs in the real world about this whale.
This was the final vote: 78 percent of the votes. To give you an idea of the landslide, the next highest name pulled in three.
There was a clear lesson: the Internet loves Mister Splashy Pants. Which is obvious. It's a great name. Everyone wants to hear their news anchor say, "Mister Splashy Pants."
I think that's what helped drive this. What was cool were the repercussions. Greenpeace created an entire marketing campaign around it -- Mister Splashy Pants shirts and pins, an e-card so you could send your friend a dancing Splashy. But even more important was that they accomplished their mission. The Japanese government called off their whaling expedition. Mission accomplished: Greenpeace was thrilled, the whales were happy -- that's a quote.
And actually, Redditors in the Internet community were happy to participate, but they weren't whale lovers. A few, certainly, but we're talking about a lot of people, really interested and caught up in this meme. Greenpeace came back to the site and thanked Reddit for its participation. But this wasn't really altruism; just interest in doing something cool.

This is how the Internet works. This is that great big secret. The Internet provides a level playing field. Your link is as good as your link, which is as good as my link. With a browser, anyone can get to any website no matter your budget. That is, as long as you can keep net neutrality in place.
Another important thing is it costs nothing to get content online. There are so many publishing tools available, it only takes a few minutes to produce something. and the cost of iteration is so cheap, you might as well.
If you do, be genuine. Be honest, up-front. One of the great lessons Greenpeace learned is that it's OK to lose control, OK to take yourself a little less seriously, given that, even though it's a very serious cause, you could ultimately achieve your goal. That's the final message I want to share: you can do well online. But no longer is the message coming from just the top down. If you want to succeed you've got to be OK to lose control.
Thank you.

#Internet #Animals #Business #Culture #Entertainment #Entrepreneur #Ocean

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🟢How I made friends with reality?

#Aging #Cancer #Comedy #Death #Creativity #Happiness #Humanity #Humor #Illness

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🟢How I made friends with reality?

I'm going to first tell you something that in my grandmother would've elicited a five-oy alarm: "Oy-oy-oy-oy-oy." And here it is ... are you ready? OK. I have stage IV lung cancer. Oh, I know, "poor me." I don't feel that way. I'm so OK with it. And granted, I have certain advantages -- not everybody can take so cavalier an attitude. I don't have young children. I have a grown daughter who's brilliant and happy and wonderful. I don't have huge financial stress. My cancer isn't that aggressive. It's kind of like the Democratic leadership --
not convinced it can win. It's basically just sitting there, waiting for Goldman Sachs to give it some money.
Oh, and the best thing of all -- I have a major accomplishment under my belt. Yes. I didn't even know it until someone tweeted me a year ago. And here's what they said: "You are responsible for the pussification of the American male."
Not that I can take all the credit, but ...
But what if you don't have my advantages? The only advice I can give you is to do what I did: make friends with reality. You couldn't have a worse relationship with reality than I did. From the get-go, I wasn't even attracted to reality. If they'd had Tinder when I met reality, I would have swiped left and the whole thing would have been over.
And reality and I -- we don't share the same values, the same goals --
To be honest, I don't have goals; I have fantasies. They're exactly like goals but without the hard work.
I'm not a big fan of hard work, but you know reality -- it's either push, push, push, push, push through its agent, the executive brain function -- one of the "yays" of dying: my executive brain function won't have me to kick around anymore.
But something happened that made me realize that reality may not be reality. So what happened was, because I basically wanted reality to leave me alone -- but I wanted to be left alone in a nice house with a Wolf range and Sub-Zero refrigerator ... private yoga lessons -- I ended up with a development deal at Disney. And one day I found myself in my new office on Two Dopey Drive --
And I'm staring at the present they sent me to celebrate my arrival -- not the Lalique vase or the grand piano I've heard of other people getting, but a three-foot-tall, stuffed Mickey Mouse
with a catalog, in case I wanted to order some more stuff that didn't jibe with my aesthetic.
And when I looked up in the catalog to see how much this three-foot-high mouse cost, here's how it was described ... "Life-sized."
And that's when I knew. Reality wasn't "reality." Reality was an imposter.
So I dived into quantum physics and chaos theory to try to find actual reality, and I've just finished a movie -- yes, finally finished -- about all that, so I won't go into it here, and anyway, it wasn't until after we shot the movie, when I broke my leg and then it didn't heal, so then they had to do another surgery a year later, and then that took a year -- two years in a wheelchair, and that's when I came into contact with actual reality: limits.
Those very limits I'd spent my whole life denying and pushing past and ignoring were real, and I had to deal with them, and they took imagination, creativity and my entire skill set. It turned out I was great at actual reality. I didn't just come to terms with it, I fell in love. And I should've known, given my equally shaky relationship with the zeitgeist ... I'll just say, if anyone is in the market for a Betamax
I should have known that the moment I fell in love with reality, the rest of the country would decide to go in the opposite direction.
But I'm not here to talk about Trump or the alt-right or climate-change deniers or even the makers of this thing, which I would have called a box, except that right here, it says, "This is not a box."
They're gaslighting me.

But what I do want to talk about is a personal challenge to reality that I take personally, and I want to preface it by saying that I absolutely love science. I have this -- not a scientist myself -- but an uncanny ability to understand everything about science, except the actual science --
which is math. But the most outlandish concepts make sense to me. The string theory; the idea that all of reality emanates from the vibrations of these teeny -- I call it "The Big Twang."
Wave-particle duality: the idea that one thing can manifest as two things ... you know? That a photon can manifest as a wave and a particle coincided with my deepest intuitions that people are good and bad, ideas are right and wrong. Freud was right about penis envy and he was wrong about who has it.
And then there's this slight variation on that, which is reality looks like two things, but it turns out to be the interaction of those two things, like space -- time, mass -- energy and life and death. So I don't understand -- I simply just don't understand the mindset of people who are out to "defeat death" and "overcome death." How do you do that? How do you defeat death without killing off life? It doesn't make sense to me.
I also have to say, I find it incredibly ungrateful. I mean, you're given this extraordinary gift -- life -- but it's as if you had asked Santa for a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow and you had gotten a salad spinner instead. You know, it's the beef -- the beef with it is that it comes with an expiration date. Death is the deal breaker. I don't get that. I don't understand -- to me, it's disrespectful. It's disrespectful to nature. The idea that we're going to dominate nature, we're going to master nature, nature is too weak to withstand our intellect -- no, I don't think so. I think if you've actually read quantum physics as I have -- well, I read an email from someone who'd read it, but --
You have to understand that we don't live in Newton's clockwork universe anymore. We live in a banana peel universe, and we won't ever be able to know everything or control everything or predict everything. Nature is like a self-driving car. The best we can be is like the old woman in that joke -- I don't know if you've heard it. An old woman is driving with her middle-aged daughter in the passenger seat, and the mother goes right through a red light. And the daughter doesn't want to say anything that makes it sound like, "You're too old to drive," so she didn't say anything. And then the mother goes through a second red light, and the daughter, as tactfully as possible, says, "Mom, are you aware that you just went through two red lights?" And the mother says, "Oh, am I driving?"
So ... and now, I'm going to take a mental leap, which is easy for me because I'm the Evel Knievel of mental leaps; my license plate says, "Cogito, ergo zoom." I hope you're willing to come with me on this, but my real problem with the mindset that is so out to defeat death is if you're anti-death, which to me translates as anti-life, which to me translates as anti-nature, it also translates to me as anti-woman, because women have long been identified with nature. And my source on this is Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher who wrote a book called "The Human Condition." And in it, she says that classically, work is associated with men. Work is what comes out of the head; it's what we invent, it's what we create, it's how we leave our mark upon the world. Whereas labor is associated with the body. It's associated with the people who perform labor or undergo labor. So to me, the mindset that denies that, that denies that we're in sync with the biorhythms, the cyclical rhythms of the universe, does not create a hospitable environment for women or for people associated with labor, which is to say, people that we associate as descendants of slaves, or people who perform manual labor.

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So here's how it looks from a banana-peel-universe point of view, from my mindset, which I call "Emily's universe." First of all, I am incredibly grateful for life, but I don't want to be immortal. I have no interest in having my name live on after me. In fact, I don't want it to, because it's been my observation that no matter how nice and how brilliant or how talented you are, 50 years after you die, they turn on you.
And I have actual proof of that. A headline from the Los Angeles Times: "Anne Frank: Not so nice after all."
Plus, I love being in sync with the cyclical rhythms of the universe. That's what's so extraordinary about life: it's a cycle of generation, degeneration, regeneration. "I" am just a collection of particles that is arranged into this pattern, then will decompose and be available, all of its constituent parts, to nature, to reorganize into another pattern. To me, that is so exciting, and it makes me even more grateful to be part of that process.
You know, I look at death now from the point of view of a German biologist, Andreas Weber, who looks at it as part of the gift economy. You're given this enormous gift, life, you enrich it as best you can, and then you give it back. And, you know, Auntie Mame said, "Life is a banquet" -- well, I've eaten my fill. I have had an enormous appetite for life, I've consumed life, but in death, I'm going to be consumed. I'm going into the ground just the way I am, and there, I invite every microbe and detritus-er and decomposer to have their fill. I think they'll find me delicious.
So the best thing about my attitude, I think, is that it's real. You can see it. You can observe it. It actually happens. Well, maybe not my enriching the gift, I don't know about that -- but my life has certainly been enriched by other people. By TED, which introduced me to a whole network of people who have enriched my life, including Tricia McGillis, my website designer, who's working with my wonderful daughter to take my website and turn it into something where all I have to do is write a blog. I don't have to use the executive brain function ... Ha, ha, ha, I win!
And I am so grateful to you. I don't want to say "the audience," because I don't really see it as we're two separate things. I think of it in terms of quantum physics, again. And, you know, quantum physicists are not exactly sure what happens when the wave becomes a particle. There are different theories -- the collapse of the wave function, decoherence -- but they're all agreed on one thing: that reality comes into being through an interaction. (Voice breaking) So do you. And every audience I've ever had, past and present. Thank you so much for making my life real.

#Aging #Cancer #Comedy #Death #Creativity #Happiness #Humanity #Humor #Illness

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🟢Go ahead, dream about the future

#Science_Fiction #Future #Creativity #Society #Writing #Storytelling

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🟢Go ahead, dream about the future

Every science fiction writer has a story about a time when the future arrived too soon. I have a lot of those stories. Like, OK, for example: years ago, I was writing a story where the government starts using drones to kill people. I thought that this was a really intense, futuristic idea, but by the time the story was published, the government was already using drones to kill people.
Our world is changing so fast, and there's a kind of accelerating feedback loop where technological change and social change feed on each other. When I was a kid in the 1980s, we knew what the future was going to look like. It was going to be some version of "Judge Dredd" or "Blade Runner." It was going to be neon megacities and flying vehicles. But now, nobody knows what the world is going to look like even in just a couple years, and there are so many scary apparitions lurking on the horizon. From climate catastrophe to authoritarianism, everybody is obsessed with apocalypses, even though the world ends all the time, and we keep going.
Don't be afraid to think about the future, to dream about the future, to write about the future. I've found it really liberating and fun to do that. It's a way of vaccinating yourself against the worst possible case of future shock. It's also a source of empowerment, because you cannot prepare for something that you haven't already visualized. But there's something that you need to know. You don't predict the future; you imagine the future.
So as a science fiction writer whose stories often take place years or even centuries from now, I've found that people are really hungry for visions of the future that are both colorful and lived in, but I found that research on its own is not enough to get me there. Instead, I use a mixture of active dreaming and awareness of cutting-edge trends in science and technology and also insight into human history. I think a lot about what I know of human nature and the way that people have responded in the past to huge changes and upheavals and transformations. And I pair that with an attention to detail, because the details are where we live. We tell the story of our world through the tools we create and the spaces that we live in. And at this point, it's helpful to know a couple of terms that science fiction writers use all of the time: "future history" and "second-order effects."
Now, future history is basically just what it sounds like. It is a chronology of things that haven't happened yet, like Robert A. Heinlein's famous story cycle, which came with a detailed chart of upcoming events going up into the year 2100. Or, for my most recent novel, I came up with a really complicated time line that goes all the way to the 33rd century and ends with people living on another planet.
Meanwhile, a second-order effect is basically the kind of thing that happens after the consequences of a new technology or a huge change. There's a saying often attributed to writer and editor Frederik Pohl that "A good science fiction story should predict not just the invention of the automobile, but also the traffic jam."
And speaking of traffic jams, I spent a lot of time trying to picture the city of the future. What's it like? What's it made of? Who's it for? I try to picture a green city with vertical farms and structures that are partially grown rather than built and walkways instead of streets, because nobody gets around by car anymore -- a city that lives and breathes. And, you know, I kind of start by daydreaming the wildest stuff that I can possibly come up with, and then I go back into research mode, and I try to make it as plausible as I can by looking at a mixture of urban futurism, design porn and technological speculation. And then I go back, and I try to imagine what it would actually be like to be inside that city. So my process kind of begins and ends with imagination, and it's like my imagination is two pieces of bread in a research sandwich

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