Joys of J (ep.19)
The movement cannot lose momentum.. it’s only just begun and we have a very, very, very long, arduous road ahead. Highlighting the powerful group that is Street Riders NYC. This started as a small group of friends that wanted to help provide a safety net and shield between the police and protesters. It’s since grown into a near 8,000 riders at times… quite literally a group of powerful people demanding and paving the way for change. Follow them on Instagram for a heads up on the next ride.
I plan to continue to always share helpful and actionable resources as I discover them however this week I’m going to take it back to some of the usual programming of Joys of J where I share some of the random favorites of my week across podcasts, products, books, & more. As always, hope you enJOY.
Before doing so, I wanted to share another amazing mission that a few friends (Anderson Sib shoutout 👊) approached a group of us with….
I’m so proud to be surrounded by friends who care deeply about the future state of our country/world for that matter and what better way to stay connected during this time whilst also working collectively to initiate progressive change. If you are interested in joining the crew as we work to flip the battleground states click here to join our Slack channel where we share updates + useful information.If you want to learn more about Adopt a State, check out their website here for more details.
🎙️ What Podcast Episode I Learned From
The Ezra Klein Show - Nicholas Carr on Deep Reading and Digital Thinking
“We are devaluing deep reading as we come to perform it less and less often.”
“We don’t constrain our mental powers when we store new long-term memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence. The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory - but when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, by bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches.”
“What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. ”
“When it comes to thinking about our knowledge and intelligence is the ability to move information from our working memory into our long term memory and the reason that is so important is that during that process which is called memory consolidation in which we create connections and associations between the new piece of information and everything else we know. It’s those associations and connections that give information context, that give knowledge it’s richness, that lead to our ability to think in creative ways and make metaphors and leaps of imagination.. it’s only the things that you focus on for some period of time that make the transfer from your working memory to your long term memory. And what we’ve done with the internet and online life in general is we’ve essentially created a machine that is good at short circuiting memory consolidation and the reason for that is that we are taking in so much info so quickly that things are going into and out of our short term memory very quickly so we are rarely giving ourselves the time and focus to really attend to information and as a result we are not consolidating it very well, we are not creating rich associations and connections and so we get a googlization of knowledge. Google gives us bits of info quickly but it doesn’t give us the rich personal connection between all the information. We even see this in the way that we talk about memory. People commonly say ‘Isn’t it great that we have Google and we don’t have to remember anything anymore and that frees up our mind to do deep thinking’. This is a complete distortion of the way the mind works. Deep thinking is all about moving things into memory so we can create connections and associations between the two. Reducing our capacity for memory doesn’t free the mind up for deeper thinking, it constrains the mind’s ability to do deep thinking.”
🌐 What Website I Find Amazing
The Literal Translation of Country Names
“Have you ever stopped and thought about the name of your home country or one you’re traveling to? What it means, where it came from, how it came to be?”
Look no further…
Personal favorite…
And if you really want to get wild with it and travel down the rabbit hole that you all know I inevitably went down Wikipedia has a great etymological list that dives into the history and detailings of how each name came to be.
📖 What Book I Loved
Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World - Thanks for this recco Krissy K!
“Loneliness occurs when our social experience fails to meet our social expectations.”
"Researchers have identified three “dimensions” of loneliness to reflect the particular type of relationships that are missing. Intimate, or emotional, loneliness is the longing for a close confidante or intimate partner—someone with whom you share a deep mutual bond of affection and trust. Relational, or social, loneliness is the yearning for quality friendships and social companionship and support. Collective loneliness is the hunger for a network or community of people who share your sense of purpose and interests. These three dimensions together reflect the full range of high-quality social connections that humans need in order to thrive."
“Human relationship is as essential to our well-being as food and water. Just as hunger and thirst are our body’s ways of telling us we need to eat and drink, loneliness is the natural signal that reminds us when we need to connect with other people.”
“The impact of lacking social connection on reducing life span is equal to the risk of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.”
“Cacioppo’s evolutionary theory of loneliness was rooted in the observation that humans have survived as a species not because we have physical advantages like size, strength, or speed, but because of our ability to connect in social groups. We exchange ideas. We coordinate goals. We share information and emotions. “Our strength is our ability to communicate and work together.”
“Whenever we finish doing some kind of non-social thinking… the network for social thinking comes back on like a reflex—almost instantly. In other words: Evolution has placed a bet that the best thing for our brain to do in any spare moment is to get ready to see the world socially. . . . We are built to be social creatures. This means that we’re constantly preparing for our next meeting, love affair, confrontation. Even if we don’t realize it—even if we think of ourselves as profoundly introverted or task-oriented—we spend most of our time thinking about other people. To a large extent, that’s because our relationships with other people define us.”
“We tend to feel lonely when something goes “wrong” and we don’t make friends the way we “should,” or marry the person we “should,” or interact with our neighbors and colleagues as we “should.” All these “shoulds” quietly seep into us as we grow up. They include the expectations for love, friendship, and community that are modeled by our family, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and the larger culture that surrounds us. We also absorb these norms through the messages transmitted by television, movies, and our social media feeds. And when our own social life doesn’t mirror the cultural norms around us, we tend to feel lonely.”
“Many of us feel pushed by modern society to be more independent, even as, deep down, we crave the interconnectedness that our ancestors depended on.”
“The simple reality is that we no longer have the luxury of thinking and acting tribally. Not only is it becoming harder to isolate ourselves from members of different cultures, but isolation costs us in terms of perspective and experience, which are ever more valuable resources in our global society. My view is that we have veered too far away from the group and toward the individual—throwing culture out of balance in the process—more out of benign neglect than anything else.
✨We’ve emphasized freedom of individual expression without also ensuring that the underpinnings of community are protected and strengthened. Now we need to recapture our investment in the collective elements that matter—our relationships, our community organizations, our neighborhoods, our social and cultural institutions—and we must do this while continuing to protect individual expression.” ✨ <— THIS!
😍 What Product I Love
If you eat popcorn in a similar cadence as I do (which is pretty much every single day), let me introduce you to your new best friend.
The Original Hotpop Microwave Popcorn Popper
From the moment you think to yourself “I want some popcorn” to the moment you are eating popcorn is all of 3 and a half minutes with this magic worker. And don’t even get me started on how easy it is to clean and prep for your next round.
I personally like to spice it up with different seasonings/oils as popcorn is so versatile.Here are a few of my favorites:
Frank’s Red Hot Seasoning Blend
Black Truffle Flavored Olive Oil Spray
Get to Poppin’!
🎶 What Song is Moving Me
🚿 Latest Shower Thought
Why do we all have different body odor?
Apparently our armpits “have the largest apocrine gland in the body and are routinely piping out a lot of important social information..these armpit odor molecules are sucked up into our sinuses, processed by our brains, and translated into some rather interesting psychological and behavioral reactions.”
“Men’s body odors tend to be more pungent than women’s. Women have an almost preternatural olfactory sense, one that appears designed for unconsciously sniffing out the mate value of prospective reproductive partners. This sex difference is probably owed to the fact that women evolved to be more discerning in their choice of sexual partners.”
💡Fact That Blew My Mind
Since the iPhone came out we chew gum less.
“Supermarket checkout lines — strategically stocked with magazines and candy — were for a long time a major point of sale for gum. Consumers waiting on line to pay would look around and make impulse buys. Now, however, we’re so consumed with our phones that we’re not reaching for a pack of gum to stave off our boredom. Indeed, gum sales have declined 15 percent since 2007, the year the iPhone came out, according to market research firm Euromonitor International.”
And if you haven’t already seen the incessant dump of shares re: the launch of our new children’s book, Little Dumplings, check.it.out.
If you’d still like to lock in a copy from the first round of orders you can do so through our Kickstarter campaign here (which will be closing out this week). So deeply grateful for everyone’s support thus far! We are so excited to get these books in your hands and share how we plan to take this project far beyond the book thereafter. Think… dump diapers, dump cookbook and more!