Tag: Everyone

Of all the racket sports, table tennis is the one played by the most people worldwide, and the reason is not that it makes the best television. It is that almost anybody can play, at almost any age, in a room they already own.

It is enjoyable, which is not a small argument

There is no better argument than this one. The game is entertaining in a way you do not get elsewhere, and the pace of it produces a genuine lift while you are playing, which is worth having regularly rather than once.

Take that seriously rather than skipping past it. Most exercise fails because people stop doing it. A game you actually want to play is doing something no disciplined routine can do, which is to keep happening.

It turns the house into somewhere people come

A table at home makes the place more fun, and it makes it a house your friends are willing to travel to. It also means more hours spent with the family in the same room, doing something together rather than in parallel.

That is the quiet benefit and probably the largest. A table in a room is a standing invitation. It needs no arrangement, no booking and no particular occasion, and two people who would otherwise have been on separate screens end up talking across it.

It demands complete attention

The game is fast and it requires total concentration on the ball along with fine coordination between hand and eye. Playing regularly sharpens alertness and the ability to hold focus.

The honest version of that claim is narrower than it usually appears. What clearly improves is your reaction and tracking in the game itself, and there is no good evidence that this transfers to concentration at a desk. What does transfer is the twenty minutes during which nothing else could possibly hold your attention, which for most people is rarer than it ought to be.

What it asks of you

Very little. Space for the table, two bats, a ball, and one other person. No particular fitness to begin with and no upper age at which it stops working. Among the things that get recommended for health and family life, almost nothing else has a barrier this low.

There is an old tale worth retelling, and then there is the reason it has lasted.

The story

An elderly man put it about that his neighbour was a thief. The younger man was arrested on the strength of it. Some days later he was cleared, and he walked home through the same streets carrying the humiliation of having been taken away in front of them. He then took the older man to court for accusing him falsely.

In the courtroom the old man offered the defence such people always offer. They were only remarks. Nobody was hurt.

The judge did not pass sentence. Instead he told the old man to write down every remark he had made, on paper, and to cut the paper into pieces, and to scatter the pieces on the way home. Come back tomorrow, he said, for the sentence.

When the man returned, the judge issued one instruction ahead of any sentence. Go out, he said, and collect every scrap you scattered on your way home.

The old man said what anybody would say. That is impossible. The wind has taken them and I would not know where to begin.

And the judge said that this is exactly what a few careless remarks do to a person’s good name. They go too far and into too many hands to be called back. The old man understood what he had done and asked to be forgiven.

Why it holds

The moral attached to the tale is plain enough. Do not accuse anybody of anything before you know whether it is true, because your words can destroy a reputation that was never at fault.

What makes the story more than a pleasant lesson is the asymmetry it describes. An accusation is interesting, so it is repeated. A correction is dull, so it is not. The two pieces of information travel at completely different speeds through the same set of people, which means a retraction almost never reaches the whole audience that heard the original.

And there is a second effect layered on that. People remember that they heard something about a person far longer than they remember what it was or whether it turned out to be true. A name acquires a faint cloud. Nobody can say why.

What it costs to be careful

Very little, which is the point. Before repeating something about somebody, ask where it came from and whether the person telling you actually knows. If the answer is that somebody else said so, you have not learned anything, you have only been handed something to carry.

The judge in the story could have fined the old man. Making him try to gather the paper was better, because a fine ends and the understanding does not.

Each person carries a manner of moving through life that belongs to them alone. That is easiest to take seriously once you notice that every human being stands in a distinct position, and nobody else is standing quite where they stand.

We grow up in different places, shaped by a range of influences nobody chose. The preferences, values and beliefs we hold are bound up closely with where we came from, and the impulse to make our own experience particular is instinctive, because doing so is what lets us cope when we have to face things alone. The result is that each of us carries a perspective that is genuinely ours and not quite anybody else’s.

What that means in a difficult room

Interacting peacefully and usefully with people from every walk of life is first a matter of understanding where they are coming from. Once you have some of that, you can adjust your expectations, which stops you making assumptions about them that were never warranted.

Because in the middle of a disagreement, the assumption arrives on its own. They are being difficult. They are being unreasonable. They are just stubborn. We become frustrated when somebody close by does not share our opinion, or will not support what we are trying to do.

It is far more likely that the person in front of you simply holds a different notion of what matters in a life. Stubbornness and a different set of priorities look identical from the outside and require completely different responses.

The move that opens it

When there is a barrier between you and somebody else, think of questions you could ask that would give you a fuller picture of their point of view. Not rhetorical ones. Actual ones, to which you do not know the answer.

What you often discover is that the difference in perspective dividing you is not really about the matter under discussion. It is attached to an insecurity or some personal difficulty that shapes how they see everything, and the argument you are having is a proxy. Asking what they are protecting will get you further than establishing who is correct.

Two honest limits

The first: you will never fully grasp the complexity of another person, and you do not need to. You can go a very long way on the simple habit of reaching towards people in a spirit of sympathetic comprehension, and stopping there is not a failure.

The second, and this one matters more. Accepting that somebody was formed elsewhere is not the same as accepting whatever they do. Understanding why a person behaves badly explains the behaviour, it does not licence it, and there is a version of tolerance that quietly becomes an excuse for putting up with harm. Respect the right of every person to determine their own course. That right ends where it starts costing somebody else theirs.

Laughter therapy, sometimes called humour therapy, is the deliberate use of humour to improve how a person feels. Hospitals run programmes. The claims attached to it have grown enormous, and that is a pity, because the modest true thing underneath is genuinely interesting and gets buried under the rest.

The claim that holds

Robin Dunbar and colleagues ran a series of studies in which people watched either comedy or neutral material and then had their pain threshold measured. Threshold rose after genuine, helpless, breathless laughter, and it did not rise after material that people found pleasant but did not actually laugh at.

That distinction is the whole finding. The active ingredient appears to be the physical exertion of laughing, the repeated forced exhalation, which is the kind of effort that triggers endorphin release much as other exertion does. Polite social laughter does not involve that exertion, and it does not produce the effect.

This also explains why laughter is so relentlessly social. Laughing is many times more likely in company than alone, and the pain threshold that rises is a rough measure of endorphin activity, which is the same system implicated in social bonding across primates. Shared helpless laughter is closer to grooming than to medicine.

The claims that do not hold

Ten to fifteen minutes of laughter burns forty calories. This traces to a single small laboratory study of energy expenditure while people watched comedy. Forty calories is a few almonds. It is a charming fact and it is not a plan.

Laughing releases endorphins that outdo an equivalent dose of morphine. Nobody ever measured any such thing. The sentence sets a hormone against a drug in units that do not exist, and it has survived for decades purely because it startles.

It protects against heart disease, builds immunity, and lowers the blood sugar spike after a meal. Each of these rests on a small study measuring a marker, not on any study showing fewer heart attacks or fewer illnesses. A marker moving is where research starts, not where advice starts.

What to do with all that

Nothing medical. If something is wrong, the person to talk to is a doctor, and no amount of comedy substitutes for that.

What the evidence does support is smaller and easier. Laughing properly, with other people, for long enough to lose your breath, makes the next hour more bearable and the people you did it with feel closer. That is not a miracle cure. It is a decent reason to spend an evening with the friends who make you laugh like that, which very few of us schedule and most of us miss.

You did everything correctly. You set the goal, you took action, and somewhere along the way it did not work and the result you wanted did not arrive.

Then comes the account of why. It was a bitter winter. The supplier delivered late, or delivered the wrong item, or the right item in the wrong colour. The schools closed and the children were at home. You caught a cold. The dog died. You have heard every one of these and you have offered most of them.

The test

Here is the thing that makes this hard. Every sentence in that paragraph may be entirely true. A reason and an excuse are not distinguished by honesty, because both of them are usually honest. They are distinguished by what happens next.

A reason changes the next attempt. The supplier was late, so this time there is a second supplier, or a longer lead time, or a penalty clause. An excuse changes nothing. It closes the matter and leaves the arrangement exactly as it was, ready to produce the same result.

So the question is not whether it was your fault. It is whether anything about Monday is different because of what you have just explained.

Start with what actually matters

A great deal of time goes on work that does not really matter, and the tasks that do matter go unfinished. The excuse then arrives to account for the productivity problem, which is a neat way of justifying poor decisions about where the hours went. Identify the few tasks that genuinely matter, finish those, and give the remainder whatever is left over.

Watch for a belief that has set a ceiling

What you hold to be true about your own limit governs what you attempt, and what you attempt governs what arrives, so a belief of that kind behaves less like an observation and more like a forecast that quietly arranges its own weather. It shows in the thinking, then in the talking, and most of all in the doing. Conceding that one of these is wrong is uncomfortable, and it is the only thing that opens the loop.

Or is the method itself the problem?

Where the same approach keeps producing the same disappointing result, change the approach. Most people will not, because an untried method carries risk while the familiar one has a known ending, even a mediocre known ending. Courage is cheaper here than it looks, precisely because the familiar method has already shown you where it stops.

Or are you simply being impatient?

In an age of immediate everything it is easy to forget that some things take the time they take. You may not have failed at all. The results may simply not have arrived yet, and doubt at this stage will stop you taking the one action that would let them. Decide in advance how long you will keep going, and do not hold the verdict before the window has closed.

And sometimes it is genuinely not you

Worth saying plainly, because the whole genre pretends otherwise. Take the economy as an excuse for a business that will not grow. People are spending more cautiously and the easy customers are not there any more. That is real. What is also real is that the remaining customers, higher up, are committed and keen, harder to find and worth considerably more when you find them. The external condition was true. It just was not the end of the sentence.

Cicero said that the face is a picture of the mind, and two thousand years later it is still the first thing we read in a room. A micro expression is the involuntary version: a flicker that appears for a fraction of a second, driven by an emotion actually being felt. Held expressions are easy to fake. The flicker is much harder.

So the promise attached to this is tempting. Learn the signals and you can tell what somebody is thinking. Here is what the signals are, and here is what they are honestly worth.

Blinking

People who are uncomfortable blink more than people who are at ease. The claim usually attached to this is that a rise in blink rate exposes a lie. Discomfort is real and visible. What causes it is not written on the face.

The pupils

This one is genuinely outside anybody’s control. Look at something you find appealing and your pupils widen, whether or not you would like them to. It is as close to an honest signal as a face produces, and it reports interest rather than truthfulness.

The mouth and the exit

A hand drifting across the mouth. A swallow. A glance towards the door. These are collected as the tells of somebody managing a lie, and the reasoning is that a person who wants to be truthful and is not feels the tension of it.

Now the part that is usually left out

People are poor at detecting lies from behaviour. Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo gathered the research on this and published the result in 2006, pooling hundreds of studies in which people judged whether someone was telling the truth. Ordinary people and trained professionals alike landed only a little above a coin toss. Confidence rises with practice. Accuracy does not.

The reason is that every cue on the list above is a sign of stress, and being disbelieved is stressful whether or not you are lying. An honest person under suspicion produces the whole set.

So the superpower is real but pointed the other way. Faces are excellent at telling you that something is going on, and unreliable at telling you what. Treat a cluster of signals as a reason to ask a question, never as a verdict.

One more lens

Age changes what a face is even being asked to do. People who grew up with a screen between themselves and the conversation often say the hard things in writing and keep the face out of it. People who did not will want the difficult conversation in a room. Neither is avoidance. Knowing which one you are facing tells you where to hold the conversation.

Every decision you make about money runs on a belief you have probably never stated. It was assembled out of how money was handled in the house you grew up in, and it is doing more work than any spreadsheet. Five of these turn up again and again.

No philosophy at all

Money arrives and money leaves. There may be a steady income and the feeling is still one of being short, often with a card balance that never quite closes and a permanent sense of catching up. Some people spend an entire working life here.

The way out is unglamorous. Shrink the life temporarily and do the dull work of getting straight. Start refusing things, including some obligations you took on because refusing felt impossible. Telephone the bank or the card company and ask for a repayment arrangement, which they will usually discuss. Take extra work for a defined stretch if that is available to you.

Handing it to somebody else

A common pattern, and one the source page described in a way I am not going to repeat, because it blamed a group of people rather than describing a habit. The habit is this: one adult in a household manages the money and the other stays out of it entirely.

The problem is not the division of labour. It is the absence of ownership. The person who has stepped back cannot answer basic questions about their own position. The fix is not a takeover. It is periodic oversight, and stating plainly where you want your money to be and at what rate you expect it to grow.

The simple approach

Provident fund, fixed deposits, sometimes property, sometimes an insurance policy treated as a savings plan. It feels safe, and it usually underperforms, because the whole position is defensive and inflation quietly removes the value of money sitting still.

The balanced approach

A spread across several kinds of asset, with a fixed share of income invested steadily month after month regardless of what the news is doing. The defining feature is not any particular product. It is the spreading of risk across categories and the willingness to let time do the compounding.

The aggressive approach

Heavy exposure to equities, and often to start-ups, active trading, attempts to time the market, or a second property bought to be sold on. High risk in the literal sense: the large gain and the heavy loss are the same strategy seen on two different days.

One structural note

The page set out the usual shape of a balanced position. A defensive core that protects against inflation and bad years. A solid middle with moderate risk. And, because the base is secure, a meaningful share pointed at growth.

Which of the five you are in is worth knowing. Which you should move to is a question for a qualified adviser who can see your actual numbers, not for an article.

Most of us were taught young that some feelings are unacceptable. Anger, resentment, fear, sorrow. Not argued out of them, simply given to understand that they should not be shown. What follows is predictable. A feeling that cannot be stated does not evaporate. It looks for another exit.

The shapes it takes

Someone who feels guilty saying no agrees to things, then breaks the promise later. They could not refuse when refusing was the honest answer, so the refusal arrives as unreliability instead.

Someone else substitutes a compliment with an edge on it for the insult they will not say. The words are warm and the meaning is cold, and the distance it creates is the point.

Underneath both is usually a person in more difficulty than the behaviour suggests. More often than not it is a request for help made by somebody who has no other way to make it.

Where the power actually sits

Here is the part worth holding on to. Passive aggression is most often used by people who feel powerless, not powerful. Faced with feelings they have been taught to treat as unacceptable, they avoid the confrontation entirely, and the avoidance itself feels like control. Because nothing overt is ever shown, they frequently cannot understand why the people around them have drifted away.

Which tells you what not to do. Do not be drawn into a contest of power with somebody who is behaving this way because they feel they have none. You will be fighting the symptom.

Three responses that work

When a person close to you is visibly frustrated and insists nothing is wrong, say what you are actually seeing. The tone, the shortness, the gesture. Then invite them to tell you. Naming the mismatch without accusation gives them a way to speak that does not require them to admit they were sulking.

When a compliment arrives with a blade in it, explain calmly how it landed and why. Not as a complaint. As information they may not have.

When somebody breaks promise after promise, tell them plainly that they are allowed to say no to you. That is often the whole cure.

And then the uncomfortable part

Once you can see this clearly in other people, you will start to catch it in yourself. The remedy is smaller than it sounds. Say the true thing while it is still small.

The feelings we are taught to suppress are usually the ones pointing at something that needs to change. Passive aggression is the method by which we avoid changing anything at all.

We see what we would like to see, which is why the plainest facts about our own lives are the ones we notice last. That a person we love has offended us. That a friendship we counted as close is not held that way on the other side.

Life is not all sunshine. It is also an ordinary Thursday at ten at night, an empty wallet, and the discovery that some people are warm to you when you are struggling and cool when you begin to do well. Here is the short list.

On ourselves

We are excellent judges of other people’s lives and very good defence lawyers for our own. The same act gets a verdict when somebody else does it and a justification when we do.

The rat race has a problem nobody mentions at the start. If you win it, you are still a rat.

Conversations go far better in our heads than they do in rooms. The version you rehearse has a cooperative other person in it.

The sentence “I do not need to write that down, I will remember it” is false almost every time it is spoken.

We overestimate what we can get done in one day and badly underestimate what we could do in twenty years. Both errors come from the same place, which is that a day is easy to picture and a decade is not.

On other people

Most people want to see you doing well. Rather fewer want to see you doing better than them, and the second group overlaps with the first more than is comfortable.

One person’s loss really is another person’s gain, and both of them are usually decent people.

The people who can make you happiest are the same people who can make you saddest. That is not a warning about them. It is the definition of having let somebody close.

People take the path that returns the most for the least effort. This is not a character flaw, it is how effort works, and it explains more behaviour than malice ever will.

And the one that stings: the more you depend on other people to have a good time, the lonelier you tend to be when nobody is available.

What to do with a list like this

Nothing dramatic. Notice which one you reacted to. The item that irritated you on the way past is usually the one that applies.

Neighbours are worth having. Most of the time the arrangement is quietly useful, and a street where people know each other is a better street to live on. Then there is the other kind. The one you can neither avoid nor particularly want near you, who knows what time you came home and asks you why.

First, decide which problem you have

There are two of them and they need different answers. One is a neighbour who is actually doing you harm, interfering in something that matters, repeating things that damage you. The other is a neighbour who is merely irritating. People often spend the energy for the first on the second, and then wonder why the irritation grew.

If it is the smaller one, a plain word usually does more than a strategy. Say, politely and directly, that what they are doing makes you uncomfortable. Many people have genuinely not noticed. Say it once, without a speech attached.

Then be straight about the boundary

If the polite version does not land, the clear version is not rude. Tell them you would rather they did not involve themselves in your personal matters. A boundary stated plainly is easier for everyone than one enforced by atmosphere.

The counter-intuitive move

Invite them in for a coffee. It sounds like the opposite of what you want, and it works more often than it should, because it is much harder to talk about somebody you have started to like. A stranger next door is material. A person you have sat with is not.

Where the person cannot be spoken to at all, someone else in that house usually can. Say how it is affecting you and ask for help stopping it.

Why the supply matters more than the speech

Here is the mechanism under all of it. Talk needs new material. A story that gets no fresh detail runs out on its own, and the habit moves to whoever is still feeding it. That is why the quiet responses so often beat the confrontational ones.

Two of them are commonly recommended and both carry a cost. You can answer a question about your private life with a question about theirs, chosen to be equally uncomfortable. You can also ignore the person deliberately and let them see that you are doing it. Both work. Both also mean you are now playing the same game, and the street is small.

The cheaper version is simply to stop being interesting. Answer briefly, say nothing new, and let the subject starve.