Tag: Young Adults

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.

Prejudice describes an attitude towards a person that is unjustified or simply incorrect, generally a hostile one, and held on no other basis than the social group that person belongs to.

Views of that sort may fasten onto a race or onto a gender. What the definition turns on is sequence: the group is judged first, and the individual is judged afterwards, by inheritance.

Where the word came from

As a concept it appeared early in the twentieth century, and it rose quickly to become the dominant term, both in social science and in ordinary speech, for hostility directed at people because of the group or category they fall into.

The argument inside the definition

Among social scientists the standard definition has been a negative attitude held by one group towards another.

A good many of them attach a condition to that. On their account the attitude must additionally be wrong, or unwarranted, before the word properly applies.

It is that wider version, rather than the narrow technical one, that has settled into everyday use. Which explains why the word lands as an accusation when we use it, rather than as a neutral description.

Careful thought is what a wedding outfit deserves. Looking your best is the requirement, so the materials and the designers you pick from should be the best available to you.

Start by taking it seriously

Accept first that this genuinely does deserve the attention. That acceptance is step one, and a surprising number of grooms never take it.

Let the theme narrow it down

The theme decides a great deal for you. An afternoon wedding, one held outdoors, one held at night: each of them cuts the field of options down.

The safe option, and its problem

Few choices are safer for the day than a well cut classic suit. Worn with any confidence at all, it reads as smart and elegant.

Its weakness is that every other man present is also in a suit, and this is your wedding. So put a twist in it with accessories nobody else will have.

Customise it

Personalising the outfit suits a groom particularly well. Cufflinks engraved with your name will do it, or anything else that carries a reference to the day itself.

Do not dress for a meeting

Leave the comfort zone, and resist anything that edges towards corporate. This is a wedding, and looking as though a presentation is imminent is not the effect you want.

Equally, remain recognisably yourself. Settle on a style that fits your own personality and wear what you can be comfortable in.

Tailor-made usually wins

Going to a tailor is generally the better route, because the suit or traditional outfit that results is built around your own taste and your own ideas, with a designer’s expertise added on top.

Do not rent it

A few hours of wear, admittedly. But those particular hours carry more weight than any others, and renting is a cheap option in every sense, given that the garment has almost certainly been worn by somebody else already.

Stretch a little beyond your usual spending. Weddings are infrequent things. If fortune is kind, you will only have the one.

Celestial objects, the phenomena surrounding them and the question of where they came from: those together make up the subject called astronomy.

Few sciences are older. People have been practising it since prehistoric times.

What it rests on now

The modern version of the subject leans very heavily on established physics, the laws of motion set out by Newton and the general theory of relativity among them.

That dependence is recent. For most of its history astronomy was open to anybody, and reputations were built by seers and sages who put the stars to practical use.

The uses were practical indeed. Working out where you stood in the year. Steering a ship. Sailors crossing the Atlantic in the age of Columbus navigated by the same lights.

Where it goes next

Whatever comes next in astronomy will come from new ways of observing.

Interferometry is the one to watch, sometimes described as the hypertelescope, in which a network of telescopes is made to work cooperatively so that images resolve.

Pushed far enough, that technique could let us look straight at planets orbiting other stars, instead of inferring their presence from the gravitational signature they leave behind. The difference is between deducing a planet and seeing one.

The cheerfullest gathering can be reduced to a miserable one by negativity alone. And the trouble a negative thought causes is never worth whatever it was supposed to be warning you about.

Several approaches will break the pattern.

Not everything needs to be maximised

Younger people fall prey to this so easily for one reason: the molehill gets built into a mountain. And by the end, whatever happened has somehow been turned into evidence about our own faults.

Suppose a subject was failed. The world has not ended. Gather yourself and do better at the next attempt.

Picking over the problem to no purpose helps nobody. That habit is exactly what lets one small negative thought swell into a black hole large enough to swallow a person. Meet the thought early, while it is still small, and the swelling never happens.

Shutting yourself away does not work

We do it without deciding to. Nobody is spoken to. Trouble arrives, or the mood drops, and we say nothing at all.

But a head that never gets emptied out loses its grip on the problem itself, and thinking narrows down to a single track.

Speak to friends. Speak to family. Speak to whoever you trust enough to think out loud in front of.

List and cherish positive thoughts

If your conclusion is that nothing in your life is right, give it one minute of proper thought first.

Breathe in slowly and go back to the last occasion you smiled. Then find what caused it, no matter how brief the smile was or how trivial the thing that produced it.

Open your eyes, and write that cause down, along with anything else attached to that happy moment. Then do it again, and keep going until the page has no room left.

What you are holding is your positive list, and its function is to demonstrate that something good is always in there somewhere.

Positivity stems from genuine happiness

Real happiness is not issued by other people or by circumstances. It is generated internally.

Manufacture your own through singing, through dancing and through smiling. Only the negative make bad singers and bad dancers, so the saying goes. Singing releases a remarkable amount of stress. Lyrics can be forgotten and steps can be wrong, provided the time is enjoyed.

Singing and dancing are, in their way, feelings let out. Let feelings out and a smile appears on the face. And a smile a day is what keeps the negative thoughts at a distance.

Genuinely try to keep negativity away

Where does negativity come from? From negative people, and from negative situations.

There may be a friend who brings nothing but bad news, a relative whose pleasure is putting you down, a teacher who enjoys singling you out, a colleague who enjoys irritating you. Before you meet any of them, take a breath and decide in advance that what they bring is not getting into your head.

Where avoiding them is impossible, apply the effort deliberately and keep their negativity from arriving at all. In at the left ear, and straight out of the right.

Mindfulness does wonders too

Meditation helps, and so does a yoga class. Both move the focus off the problem and onto the pattern of your own breathing.

Yoga is treated by many as a relaxing form of exercise whose purpose is a brain at ease. Staying in the present matters enormously, and meditating is the most reliable route into it.

The instruction is to stop rehearsing what might happen, and to hold the attention on what is happening. Whatever it is, it is now.

Pretty pictures and silly animal stories is what people assume children’s books amount to. A good many of them are timeless instead, and they are inspiring, insightful and wise.

Sharing, the force of love, the business of becoming what you could be: none of these lessons were ever really aimed at children alone. They were aimed at the child that survives in everybody. Take the cue and see where the messages land in your own life.

We must take care of the planet

Nothing improves until somebody cares an enormous amount. Absolutely nothing.

Nearly all of us met that message early, in books and in cartoons about rescuing the world. It was among the first lessons we were given, and among the first we put down.

Love is powerful

How a thing was manufactured has no bearing on whether it is real. Realness is something done to you, by somebody who loves you over a long stretch of years.

Every story in which a toy or an animal longed to talk and dance the way people do rested on that. Somewhere a character loved without limit, and the unreal wanted to cross over because of it. That was the message underneath all of them.

Happiness has no value unless it is shared

Give away more, and what comes back is more delight, not less.

Certain books left something lovely here, which is that friendship and happiness both consist of handing your joy to other people rather than hoarding it.

Face challenges head on

Over is not an option. Under is not an option. The way out is forward, through the middle.

Hard times have unpleasant sections and no path goes round them. You plough into them instead. Book after book puts its characters in serious trouble, has them face it with courage, and has them make peace for themselves and for their friends.

Learning is a lifelong journey

Why travel from one place to another? Chiefly to see everything lying between the two.

Arriving is not the valuable part, and neither is the satisfaction that follows a milestone. The value is in the travelling, and in whatever gets learned along the way. That learning is meant to continue for as long as the journey does, which is to say for life.

Make things up as you go

No moon to see by? Then draw one. Hungry? Draw a pie. Lost? Draw somebody who can point you the right way.

Grown up, we tend to forget the point being made. The best chances life offers are usually the ones a person invents.