Briefly: Your words of sincere praise can make someone’s day

By David McElroy · May 13, 2019

As I pulled out of my driveway Monday, I glanced over at my neighbor’s yard and saw that she had dozens of bright yellow and red flowers looking gorgeous in the bright spring sunlight. I picked up my phone and called Cora as I drove so I could tell her how beautiful her yard looks today and how much I appreciate the work she’s done. I could hear the joy in her voice as she explained that she had gotten away from gardening since her husband’s death five years ago shattered her world. She said this is the first year she’s tried to get back to what she used to do — and she was proud as a peacock to have someone notice. “You have made my day, David,” she said with sincerity. The call didn’t take more than 60 seconds, but I had told her something honest that she needed to hear — and she was happy. It reminded me again that we have the power to make other people happy if we choose to care about them and express the words they need to hear. Whose day can you change today?

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Do antidepressants work? It depends on who you ask and what standards you use. But a new Danish study concludes we just don’t know. There’s no question antidepressants make chemical changes in the brain, but the truth is that doctors don’t know enough about those brain processes to do anything more than try certain drugs and see what they do. The Danish study says that if antidepressants do help, the effects are tiny. I know plenty of people who swear they couldn’t live without their antidepressants, but the more I study about the root causes of depression, the more I suspect the placebo effect is what’s going on. Although some studies suggest these drugs have slight positive effects for some people, others argue that the positive effects are tiny — and that they cause more deaths than can be explained. There’s nothing wrong with using any drug that helps with something wrong with us — especially short term — but I’m coming to suspect that whatever good SSRIs and similar drugs do comes from masking our underlying issues, not fixing them. Denial is popular with humans, so it will be no surprise if this eventually turns out to be true.

Your brain has almost certainly tricked you into making bad romantic choices. A California psychology professor writes in Psychology Today that there are four things our brains do that cause trouble: 1) We think we know what we want — but we don’t. I’ve seen this in myself and if you haven’t seen it yet, you will. The things I wanted in a mate when I was young are completely different from what the mature version of myself wants. 2) We like more choices — as many as possible. We tend to believe that more choices lead to a better selection in all sorts of areas, but the truth is that too many choices tend to lead to the paralysis of failure to choose. 3) We try to be rational by “keeping our options open.” We’re scared to make the choices we need to make, because we’re scared of doing the wrong thing. This keeps us trapped in bad situations — and better choices eventually disappear. 4) We stay with the wrong people, because we don’t want our effort to go to waste. I’ve done this. Maybe you have, too. On several occasions, I’ve stayed in a relationship that I knew was dead and needed to end. At this point in my life, I know to trust my gut. It’s a lot smarter about most things than my conscious brain.

I just noticed that I’m approaching 3,000 subscribers for this site again. Although I’ve had plenty of individual days with far higher readership, the core of any site is those readers who are interested enough to subscribe and keep coming back. In the days when I wrote about politics, I hit 3,000 subscribers at my peak, but once I shifted focus, those subscribers started dropping like flies. These days, the readership numbers are still lower than they were when I wrote about politics, but I think it’s a better quality reader — people who are interested in something more important to long-term happiness than politics will ever be. I don’t know if I’ll hit 30,000 readers in one day anytime soon — as I did one day years ago when Rush Limbaugh and several conservative commentators linked to me — but I appreciate those of you who keep coming back again and again. I can’t thank you individually — and I don’t even know who you are — but I want you to know that I really appreciate you.

Few things threaten the future of the human race as much as the decline of the widespread ability to read words and evaluate them rationally. This has become a culture dominated by images and emotions, which scares me because our freedom and our wealth were built on ideas and rational thinking. Not so long ago, it was considered vital for every person to be able to read coherent arguments and respond to them with intelligence and reason. Today, emotions trump reason and images trump words. When Neil Postman published “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in 1985, he made the argument that the age of television was slowly destroying Americans’ ability to reason. Postman is long dead, but it turns out that he and other academics such as Marshall McLuhan saw where things were going far before words started falling out of favor. I beg you to read Postman’s short and clear book, but if you won’t invest that much time, at least consider this article about news today. In “Could I have some news with my emotions, please?” a former NBC News executive bemoans the sad state of “emotion over information” in television news. I believe “television news” is an oxymoron, but I’ll leave that for another time.

UPDATE: For about 18 hours, I thought I had made a serious mistake at work last month that had sent a couple thousand dollars to the wrong party. When a problem was discovered last night, the data available to us in our accounting system made it seem certain that I had made that error. I felt sick. I was humiliated. Even though I’ve handled hundreds of real estate transactions for my company — millions of dollars — without ever making an error, I felt shame that I had made this one mistake. But it turns out that an anomaly in our accounting software was hiding the truth. Once I got to the office Thursday and reviewed the paperwork from the transaction, I discovered that I had done everything correctly. It’s great that I didn’t make the mistake, but it would be even better if I could learn not to have such horrible physical reactions of shame and fear just because someone else believes I’ve made an error. The fear of being flawed is very powerful for me. Old programming from childhood is hard to change.

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