1. Starting off this week is a fascinating read by Lily Scherlis for Harper’s Magazine. Apparently, in the corporate workplace, there is a shortage of what researchers call “soft skills” — interpersonal skills like emotional intelligence, teamwork, creativity, among a plethora of other buzzwords. The post-pandemic, anti-social culture of today is seemingly to blame for this lack of social talent. “Soft skills,” employers believe, are essential to company-wide success. Some even hope they’re the antidote to the epidemic of loneliness and the invasion of AI. But Scherlis doesn’t think so:
In an increasingly unpredictable environment, soft skills can encourage a fantasy of boundless adaptability: people and organizations will be able to adjust to anything that could possibly happen. Organizations are advised to cultivate “nimble and adaptable skills at scale” and maintain “skills agility,” continually reworking the competencies of their workers — “adaptability,” of course, being itself a soft skill. Recent articles prize shape-shifting as a competency in its own right—an underlying ur-skill of sorts—and hold out hope that our species can keep up with the world we’ve created. Everyone should be reskilling and upskilling all the time, whether they are doing daylong etiquette courses, microlearning, or nanolearning (“short bursts of instruction to help people make progress in small bites,” as LinkedIn puts it). Employees should be like the ship of Theseus, comprised of endlessly interchangeable components.
But even as soft skills claim to be a solution to automation, they also help you automate yourself, reducing human interaction to an arsenal of techniques programmed into the mind. Soft skills will apparently rescue us from redundancy even as they render human interaction a little more mechanical. Oddly, the crisis is not about how we will operate or control machines. It’s about how we will operate and control one another.
This dynamic reveals a vulnerability, in which an obsession with skills could, in fact, feed into AI optimism, rather than act as protection from encroaching technology. Happily off-loading “monotonous and unpleasant activities” to the robots, as a team of business scientists in the Netherlands describes, we risk spending most of our time dissecting one another’s personalities.
“Soft skills” are less about human connection and more about finding a way to “deal” with people. Instead of endeavoring to get to know someone for the sake of getting to know them, the Interpersonal Expert’s job is to navigate differing personalities to make them as efficient as possible.
2. Moving on from corporate connections to actual relationships, Esau McCaulley wrote a brilliant essay for the New York Times in response to watching Netflix’s new hit limited series, Adolescence. The show begins with the arrest of Jamie, a teenage boy suspected of killing his female classmate. What conspires is less of a who-dun-it and more of a why-dun-it — as the show examines the impact of father-son relationships (and largely, the Internet) on masculinity. McCaulley reflects on his own relationship with his son:
My relationship with my teenage son is different and, I think, quite warm. Still, I know that struggle. As my eldest son exited early childhood, his shoulders broadening to match mine and his voice shifting a register, I wondered what to do with this emerging adult that now inhabited my house. As someone who grew up without a dad around, I lacked a healthy model to imitate. I didn’t know how to tear down that wall of silence and mystery that creeps up between parents and their teens. But I knew that such barrier destruction is an essential task for parents. Watching the show reminded me that I wasn’t alone.
What breaks down the barrier between parent and child is not the machete of a helicopter parent, but rather, love:
As fathers, we serve as our sons’ introduction to masculinity. Too often we take that to mean that they don’t need the kind of physical affection we gave them when they were little. Or that sarcasm ought to fully replace affirmation as a means of relating to them.
Our physical affection shows them that it is OK to be strong and weak, to love and be loved. It’s one way we can give kids permission to be different. In the absence of healthy models, some boys will try to define their manhood through aggression and sexual conquest. In “Adolescence,” we see Jamie try to prove his masculinity through sexual activity and, later, deadly violence. […]
I’ve found that as parents, we must learn the rhythm of each child’s heart and play the songs that can reach him or her. All great music has a mix of structure and feel, homage and innovation that allows for true beauty to be created. Every home is different, but there are common elements that make for a flourishing childhood.
I felt the lack of it, and a number of studies suggest that other young men are feeling it, too. That lack of a secure emotional foundation has them turning to internet influencers, as the character Jamie did, who do not love them and want only to pass their emotional and sexual dysfunction to a confused young male populace.
3. Everyone likes a challenge (or so I’m told). This next article may finally answer why so many people actually enjoy running(!). Alex Hutchinson, for the Atlantic, writes on “The Paradox of Hard Work.” Hutchinson spells out what psychologists call the Effort Paradox with an example you may have experienced yourself:
When you buy a coffee table from IKEA, you have to wrestle with a bag of seemingly mismatched screws and some inscrutable pictographic instructions. If you can simply buy the same thing preassembled, Smith and his intellectual heirs predict that you’ll be willing to pay more to avoid the hassle. And it’s not just about money. The law of less work, as formulated by the American psychologist Clark Hull in the 1940s, dictates that given two choices with similar outcomes, any person—or any living organism, for that matter—will choose the option requiring the least effort.
Bizarrely, though, studies have found that we actually value the coffee table we’ve had to painstakingly construct more highly than the identical preassembled version, a phenomenon now known as the IKEA effect. As I wrote for Outside, something like this dynamic applies across all kinds of human behavior. The mountaineer George Mallory famously declared that he wanted to climb Mount Everest “because it’s there.” You can speculate about his other motivations: reaching the highest point in the world, eternal fame, and so on. But the fact remains that many of us head to the mountains with no expectation of celebrity, run marathons in the middle of the pack, and do sudoku puzzles—all activities that, like purchasing Swedish furniture, involve considerable unnecessary effort. The first marathon you run may be motivated by a desire to improve your health or by a Mallory-esque desire to find out what’s on the other side. But the second one is likely fueled by something else.
Inzlicht and his colleagues posed the Effort Paradox to make sense of this odd tendency: Sometimes we value experiences and outcomes (and coffee tables) precisely because they require effort, not in spite of that fact.
#Seculosity, much? Life is so much more satisfying when we feel like we really earned something. Even if that something is simply the opportunity to share how hard it was to accomplish this or that task. If the task didn’t require any effort on your part, was it even really worth doing?
4. Content for some prime kicks and giggles this week felt a bit slim, but here’s hoping SNL’s “One Uppers” featuring Jack Black will garner some chuckles:
Calling all White Lotus fans! If you, too, were as disappointed with the finale as the rest of the Internet, find solace in Beaverton‘s “Disappointed fans slam White Lotus finale for never revealing whether rich people have problems too.” Elsewhere: “Friendly, Happy, Loyal Therapist Wanted!”
5. In the New Statesman, Stuart Whatley dives into the problem of leisure with “The West is bored to death.” It’s easy to become bored when you live in a world saturated in convenience and teeming with an unsatisfying overabundance of entertainment and dopamine. Boredom, as it’s felt, could really be a search for meaning. “Inevitably, many streams have tapped into the quintessential modern predicament: the continued longing for wonder, awe, grace, glory, or encounters with the sublime even after all has been disenchanted.”
No wonder the paradox of effort exists — we aren’t bored if we’re actually working hard towards a goal! And if we are unable to find meaning in work we go to the next best thing: politics, relationships, or academics, to name a few. What could be the solution to the problem of leisure and our search for meaning? Whatley posits a possible answer:
A society so thoroughly steeped in the work ethic and committed to the pursuit of individual achievement cannot but fail to prepare its members for any other kinds of lives.
Yet solutions to the problem of leisure exist throughout our own wisdom tradition, which stresses the value of friendship (Epicurus), contemplation (Aristotle), and “other-regarding” public service (Cicero). These basic human goods have been severely eroded, producing an age of loneliness, inattention, and ginned-up tribalism; but each could be reclaimed with sufficient free time and a proper command over it. While there will always be demagogues, conspiracists, and cult leaders, they would have no purchase over a people who can find fulfilment in themselves.
Developing a healthy relationship with free time does not come naturally; it requires a leisure ethic, and like Aristotelian virtue, this probably needs to be cultivated from a young age. Only through deep, sustained habituation does one begin to distinguish between art and entertainment, lower and higher pleasures, titillation and the sublime…
Honing an appreciation for the more sustaining sources of self-fulfilment takes time and self-discipline, yet a vast industry exists to lure us from the primrose path. At some point, the purpose of education was no longer to create well-rounded citizens with rich inner lives, political discernment, and a capacity for spiritual or emotional self-sufficiency – as Dewey hoped. The motivation, instead, has been to sustain the economy’s stock of “human capital” in the face of constant technological change.
It’s not lost on me that the solution requiring self-discipline and a “proper command” over our free time is a rabbit hole in and of itself. But it is fascinating that that which helps us combat boredom and isolation (like art, friendship, conversation) are the first to go in our technological age.
6. Finally, for Plough, Sister Carino Hodder makes a curious comparison of two artistic depictions of Christ on Holy Saturday. The first is a painting by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch entitled Christ’s Descent into Hell, which renders Christ as a tiny subject amidst the harrowing backdrop of demons and darkness. The second is a fresco in the Basilica of San Clemente from the 9th-century that paints Christ as a giant crushing Satan under his foot.
What at first seems like a lesson in art becomes a remarkable reflection on Lent:
There is a passage in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce in which Lewis, now safely in the “Real World” of heaven, is shown hell by his companion, George MacDonald, “the Teacher.” The Teacher uses a blade of grass to point to a miniscule crack in the ground. “All hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world,” he says, “but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.” Lewis is unimpressed: “It seems big enough when you’re in it, sir,” he says. But the Teacher is unfazed by this argument. “And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains,” he replies, “if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all.”
In the season of Lent, we are invited to adjust our perspective. We may feel more at home with the world of Bosch and Bruegel, searching for a Christ hidden from our sight by an evil which seems big enough when we are in it. But by the time we arrive at Holy Saturday, those Lenten practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving may have opened us up to the grace by which God reshapes the figures of our inner landscape until they are restored to their rightful size. This daily choice to look at things the way they truly are is, for me, the basic spiritual discipline of Lent: the discipline of remembering that hell may well seem big enough when we are in it, but it is nothing compared to the love of Christ.
Strays:
- On perfection, AI filters, and TikTok beauty standards: Sophie Gilbert’s “Reclaim Imperfect Faces“
- “The Use and Abuse of Magical Thinking“
- Claire Hoffman’s (who Mbird interviewed for Issue 26 of The Mockingbird) excerpt in Vanity Fair, “Aimee Semple McPherson, the Vanishing Evangelist: Faith, Fame, and Her Alleged Kidnapping.”
- This week featured not one, but two new PZ’s Podcasts!
