Is Consumerism Killing Our Creativity? (Patricia Soucheiron)

Have you ever fallen into a black hole of comparison shopping? You’re looking for a new digital camera, for instance. You head over to Cnet.com and read some reviews of various cameras, watch the video demos, identify the model you want. Then perhaps you employ Google’s shopping search to price out the options and find the best deal. All of the sudden, it’s four hours later. You’ve found the perfect camera, but your purchasing triumph is tainted by a creeping feeling of, well, disgust. Couldn’t that time have been used better?

Iwas thinking recently about what my biggest distractions were – the things keeping me from pushing my creative projects forward. As I scanned through my daily activities, I found that the most insidious distraction was, in fact,things. More specifically, the wanting, hunting, and getting of things –  whether they be tangible (a new computer) or intangible (information).

As Annie Leonard says in The Story of Stuff, “Our primary identity has become that of being consumers – not mothers, teachers, or farmers, but of consumers. We shop and shop and shop.” We love our stuff. Yet more than the stuff itself, we love the act of finding it – the search, the anticipation.

But why is consumerism – and particularly, an online hunt for the ideal purchase – so addictive?

It turns out that our consumerist impulse stimulates the same part of the brain that fires when we’re on the trail of a great idea. As we go through the trial and error of executing an idea – What if I tried this? Ah! Now what about this? – we’re using those same wanting, hunting, getting instincts but in a nobler pursuit.

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp calls this highly addictive emotional state “seeking.” In a Slate article on seeking, writer Emily Yoffe sums up his research:

For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling ourphysical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopamine circuits ‘promote states of eagerness and directed purpose,’ Panksepp writes. It’s a state humans love to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused.

The consumerist search capitalizes on the same “seeking” part of the brain that fuels the creative rush. Of course, while consumerism can serve as an addictive substitute for the stimulation of creative activity, it offers nowhere near the same reward in the long term.

As creatives, we can often rationalize spending time on shopping by telling ourselves that we’re investing our time, energy, and money in a new tool – an item that’s going to catapult our creativity to the next level. Maybe it’s a new computer, maybe it’s a musical instrument, maybe it’s a studio of one’s own. Once you get that new thing, you think, you’ll have a superior means to complete your work.

It’s a false promise, of course. A means of procrastination baked into our consumerist culture. No external thing can prompt creativity, and there’s no substitute for just getting down to doing the work. In fact, it’s been proven that hardship – being deprived of things – stimulates creativity more than being well-off. A recent Newsweek article on America’s declining creativity reported:

Highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.
When we have less to work with, we have to be more creative. Think about that the next time the consumerist impulse is threatening to encroach on your creativity.

Gardening 'linked to longer lives'  by Pol Galí

By James GallagherHealth and science reporter, BBC News

Is getting the spade out good for the heart?

Continue reading the main story

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• Housework 'not strenuous enough'
• Midlife exercise 'protects heart'
• Exercise 'can be as good as pills'

Pottering around the garden or fixing up the house has been linked to a longer life in a study of people over the age of 60.

Older people can struggle to exercise vigorously, but the study said simply getting off the sofa and avoiding a sedentary lifestyle was a lifesaver.

The Swedish study of 4,232 people suggested the risks of heart attack and stroke were cut.

The findings were published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

The researchers at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, said elderly people tended to spend more time being sedentary and less time exercising than people in other age groups.

So they looked at the activity levels in-between sitting down and full-on exercise - such as fixing up the car, home repairs, cutting the lawn, blackberry picking or going hunting.

Longer life

The results showed that people who were more active on a daily basis had the lowest risk of a heart attack, but those who were merely active without exercising still had a lower risk than those doing nothing.

Being active reduced the risk of a heart attack or stroke by 27%, and death from any cause by 30%, during the 12-year study.

The report said: "A generally active daily life had important beneficial associations with cardiovascular health and longevity in older adults, which seemed to be regardless of regular exercise."

It said the findings had "high clinical relevance" for older people, who risked spending a lot of time on the sofa or lying in bed.

The scientists involved suggest that sitting for long periods of time may lower people's metabolic rate, or a lack of activity may alter hormones produced in muscle tissue.

These could then have knock-on effects for overall health.

'On your feet'

Dr Tim Chico, honorary consultant cardiologist at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, said: "Although this study only examined people aged 60, it is reasonable to assume that the more active someone is throughout their life, the lower their risk of cardiovascular disease.

"The message I take from this study is simple. If you want to reduce your risk of heart disease, be more active. Don't sit down for long periods; get up on your feet and do something you enjoy that involves moving around."

Christopher Allen, Senior Cardiac Nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: "Being physically active is important in maintaining good heart health. But, as this study demonstrates, you don't need a gym membership to do that.

"As long as they make you feel warmer, breathe harder and make your heart beat faster, activities such as DIY and gardening count towards the 150 minutes of moderate-intensity [weekly] activity recommended for a healthy lifestyle."

HAIRY, SCARY TARANTULAS DON'T SPOOK THEIR OWNERS- Paloma Cabestany

Tarantulas are the heaviest, hairiest, scariest spiders on the planet. They have fangs, claws and barbs. They can regrow body parts and be as big as dinner plates. But there are many people who call these creepy critters a pet or a passion and insist their beauty is worth the risk of a bite.

"They are fascinating to watch. They have eight beautiful slender legs," said Dee Reynolds. She has more than 50 tarantulas at her Los Angeles home.

Reynolds doesn't consider her tarantulas pets in the traditional sense. She says a lot of people do and will name them, talk to them and show them off.

Plus, in terms of being pets, they have lots of benefits, she said. "They don't need daily walks, they don't have to be fed special diets, they don't claw furniture or bark, and you don't have to find somebody to take care of them when you go on vacation," said Reynolds.

But, unlike Fido or Whiskers, you can't cuddle with them, dress them for Halloween or play catch. They can cost hundreds of dollars, but they can also live for 30 years.

Ken Macneil, 38, known as "Ken the Bug Guy," has about 7,000 tarantulas at his exotic pet shop in Tucson, Ariz. He sells everything from scorpions and cockroaches to ferrets, lizards and snakes, but nothing is as popular as the tarantula, and not just around Halloween.

His biggest tarantula is a mature male Goliath bird-eater that measures 10 inches long from front leg to back leg. The most expensive one Macneil has ever sold went for $900.

Macneil said his customers include museums, scientists and teachers and up to an estimated 20,000 pet owners and hobby enthusiasts.

The tarantula starts life as a sling — short for spiderling — so they can be as small as a fingernail and grow as large as a dinner plate. It eats mostly live crickets, cockroaches and some mice. The spider turns prey into stew by pumping in venom through its fangs.

When you hold a tarantula, some feel like velvet, some like pipe cleaners and some have really bristly hairs, Reynolds said.

Many tarantulas are docile. Macneil has a 9-inch spider named Tess who is "extremely docile and loves you to hold her. They don't like to be petted. Their barbs or hair would come out and make you itch," he said.

All tarantulas can bite, but most owners say it's no worse than a bee sting, unless you are allergic. If you are, it can be fatal, Reynolds said. Although there is no documented case of a fatal bite, some of the spiders have more potent venom than others, and there is no anti-venom, so you treat the symptoms and hope for the best, he said.

Reynolds has never been bitten, but Macneil said he's been bitten five or six times. He said it hurts for a few minutes, then goes numb.

So why do people keep and study tarantulas? For expert Stan Schultz, it's about the exotic.

When asked to describe the most interesting thing about the spider, Schultz said recognizing the "basic aspects of learning and, dare I say it, intelligence in tarantulas. But, before you get your hopes up, they're still closer to a cabbage than the family dog in smarts."

Critical thinking challenge: Why do tarantulas make better pets than cats or dogs?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNRS6n9TLNA

SPANISH TIME ZONE- JAKE SABIN

The reason that Spain go one hour ahead of Portugal comes from a ministerial order that Franco's government enacted the March 7, 1940 and which was considered the desirability that, from that time, the national schedule Marchase agree with those of other European countries more politically minded.

Thus Francoist Spain happened to have the same time as Hitler's Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Fascist Italy, as well as those European countries occupied and / or allied with them , leaving to belong to the same time zone as Europe West as the UK and Portugal.

In that same ministerial order also provides in article five which eventually will point to the date you had to reset the normal time , which never came, despite having elapsed since a whopping 73 years and a few governments of a different political party.

"We sleep almost an hour less than the World Health Organization recommends,'' the commission said.

"All this has a negative effect on productivity, absenteeism, stress, accidents and school drop-out rates.''

It said that following the "wrong clock" explained why Spaniards tended to eat, leave work and go to bed later than their European neighbours.

"Our timetable is determined more by the sun than by the clock. We eat at one o'clock in the afternoon and dine at eight, according to the sun, but the clock says it is three o'clock and 10 o'clock," the text said.

It added that jumping back an hour would bring Spain "into line with Europe in many respects in which we currently differ".

A cupcake could change the world! (by Laura Vivas)

Do you think a cupcake can change the world? Three years ago I asked myself that same question as my Notre Dame soccer team-mates and I baked our very first batch of tie-dye cupcakes to sponsor girls’ education in the developing world through the not-for-profit organization, She’s the First. A few cupcakes quickly turned into a couple dozen and before we knew it, we had sold over 500 cupcakes- enough to sponsor the education of three girls in Nepal.

After spending a few months getting to know our sponsored girls by exchanging letters, my team-mates and I realized that we had given the girls in Nepal so much more than just books and a school uniform. By empowering them with an education, we had given them the opportunity to break the cycle of poverty they were born into and change their lives forever. An opportunity that more than 32 million girls worldwide still do not have. We knew that our team alone could never bake nearly enough cupcakes to help all these girls, but we believed with the help of cupcake teams across the United States our impact could grow tremendously.

We shared our story and tie-dye cupcake recipe on She’s the First’s online message board. Little did we know, what started as a bake sale with a twist would quickly spiral out of control. Our tie-dye cupcakes even caught the attention of Seventeen Magazine and I was named winner of the 2012 Pretty Amazing contest! Thanks to the awareness we've been able to raise online, more than 300 cupcake teams in 30 different states and 4 different countries have sold enough tie-dye cupcakes to send 100 girls to school in Africa, Asia, and South America. Our tie-dye cupcakes have clearly sweetened these girls’ lives for the better. But we’re not stopping there!

This year our goal is to send more girls to school than ever before—but to be successful we need YOUR help! Friday, October 11^th is the International Day of the Girl, an entire day dedicated to promoting the importance of educating girls worldwide. Girl Rising is asking you to join them and stand with girls around the world to break down the obstacles that often prevent them from going to school. Celebrate by signing up to be part of She’s the First 3^rd annual Tie-Dye Cupcake Bake-Off during the week of October 25^th to November 1^st. Together, we can change the world one tie-dye cupcake at a time!

Sign up to host a tie-dye cupcake sale here! Plus check this out to learn more about Girl Rising!

Lindsay Brown, She's the First supporter

Half of teenagers sleep deprived, say experts- Carlota Valls

More than half of all teenagers may be sleep deprived, according to experts.

A combination of natural hormone changes and greater use of screen-based technology means many are not getting enough sleep.

Research has suggested teenagers need nine hours' sleep to function properly.

"Sleep is fundamentally important but despite this it's been largely ignored as part of our biology," said Russell Foster, Professor of Circadian Neuroscience at Oxford University.

"Within the context of teenagers, here we have a classic example where sleep could enhance enormously the quality of life and, indeed, the educational performance of our young people.

"Yet they're given no instruction about the importance of sleep and sleep is a victim to the many other demands that are being made of them."

'All-nighters'

At One Level Up, an internet cafe and gaming centre in Glasgow, I found a group of young people who are used to very late nights.

"There's things called 'grinds' which we have on Saturdays which are an all-nighter until 10 in the morning," said 17-year-old Jack Barclay.

"We go home, sleep till 8pm at night and then do the exact same thing again. I like staying up."

Fourteen-year-old Rachel admitted occasionally falling asleep in class because she stayed up late at night playing computer games.

"If it's a game that will save easily I'll go to bed when my mum says, 'OK you should probably get some rest', but if it's a game where you have to go to a certain point to save I'll be like, 'five more minutes!' and then an hour later 'five more minutes!', and it does mess up your sleeping pattern.

"For me it takes me about an hour to get to sleep and I'm lying there staring into nothing thinking 'I'm going to play THAT part of the game tomorrow and I'm going to play THAT part of the game the next day."

Hormonal changes

Research has shown that teenagers naturally veer towards later bedtimes and are later to rise in the morning, possibly because of the hormonal changes that occur during puberty.

However Prof Foster said electronic equipment accentuated this natural night-owl behaviour.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

The data that's

emerging suggests that these computer screens and gaming devices may well have a big effect in increasing levels of alertness”

Prof Russell FosterOxford University

He explained: "The data that's emerging suggests that these computer screens and gaming devices may well have a big effect in increasing levels of alertness.

"That will make it harder to get to sleep after you've stopped playing.

"The great problem with teenagers is that you're not only biologically programmed to go to bed late and get up late, but there's also many attractions like gaming and Facebook and texting and many teenagers are doing this into the early hours of the morning and delaying sleep even further."

Psychologist Jane Ansell set up the charity Sleep Scotland to help children with special needs establish good sleeping patterns.

However an increasing amount of the charity's workload is now spent working in mainstream schools with teenagers.

"People were being sent to me and were generally being diagnosed with Aspergers, and a lot were being diagnosed as ADHD," she said.

"I felt the first thing we had to do was to work out a sleep programme for them so that they weren't sleep deprived. Once they weren't sleep deprived, some no longer had ADHD symptoms because the symptoms of hyperactivity and sleep deprivation are pretty similar.

"I'm not saying they were all free of ADHD but it is a common mistake."

Pilot studies

Her pilot studies in three Scottish schools suggested 52% of teenagers were sleep deprived, and about 20% reported falling asleep in class at least once in the last two weeks.

While many teenagers have received exam grades over the summer, Ms Ansell said most of them did not realise that a healthy sleeping pattern could have improved their performance.

She added: "We have probably not understood how important sleep is.

"It affects your growth, and especially things like memory consolidation.

"If you don't have enough sleep your short term memory doesn't consolidate into your long term memory which is going to affect your school grades."

Steve Jobs' speech at Standford University - By Elena Sisternas

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

Video of the Commencement address.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.