Whatever doesn't kill us can make us stronger

Until now, the "whatever doesn't kill us can make us stronger" was an adage. However, a new national multi-year longitudinal study of the effects of adverse life events on mental health has found that adverse experiences do, in fact, appear to foster subsequent adaptability and resilience, with resulting advantages for mental health and well being.

They admit that these data cannot establish causation but the evidence is consistent with the proposition that in moderation, experiencing lifetime adversity can contribute to the development of resilience. The media release from Buffalo University is titled "Study Confirms: Whatever Doesn't Kill Us Can Make Us Stronger"

I don't know you but the result of this study makes me feel good. I am more grateful to make some investment on improving my AQ (adversity quotient) with the inspiration of Dr. Paul Stoltz for a number of years which cost me considerable amount of time and energy. Sometimes we know something is right through our guts even before a useful piece of research like this proves it so.

Is importance of UGC (User Generated Content) nebelous?

Thank god it is Saturday, the sun is shining in a windy winter lunch time! I have some much desired breathing space in this mission [im]possible phase of my life to take things off my chest in writing from yesterday's lunch with Helen and et al.

If there is one thing in my life that I'd like to keep despite any challenges at any levels, it would be serendipity itself. Based on this strong feeling of serendipity concept and its mechanism reflected in my day to day thoughts and activities, I conducted a study on technical aspect of UGC (User Generated Content) in my field with the assistance of Associate Professor Tuncay Ercan, which was published last week in the The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society, Volume 6, Issue 4, pp.179-188 titled "Issues in User Generated Content Process and a Proposed Model to Solve them"

Yesterday on our traditional Friday lunch (with Helen, her dad Bruce, her research mate Despina and a few members from Helen's show crew), we discussed UGC from various angles. It was interesting to see Helen being totally disagree on my views related to UGC. She said "anyone can say anything even with no context which could be so harmful at times and consequences may be very heavy and unbearable". Well, I said to Helen it could be true but anything sometimes could create something. Saying things could be better than leaving them unsaid which could have tremendous impact on our lives. My points appear to be supported by Professor David Green of Monash whom I have high respect and admiration in his studies on serendipity published in 2004 which has been a true inspiration to me since then.

Despina believed that my technical focus and my co-author Tuncay's literature search on the topic is timely and well balanced to complete the picture in a sense whilst Bruce was raising one of his eye brows with lack of the emphasis from anthropological aspect which I purposefully had hidden in the methodology section itself. However the most interesting review comment came from a CoP (Community of Practice) participant of the study who said that until we conducted this study, he even was not aware that he has been producing content which empowered his communication and maintained his connectedness in his field. For him the importance of the study was the study itself and shedding lights on this controversial and exponentially growing topic from at least one angle creating a kind of awareness. All feedback pros or cons of this study was well received by myself as they all add value for the post follow up phase of my studies.

I'd like to extend my follow up to a wider audience hence have one simple question here that may shed some lights on what UGC is or is not. My question to you is "What is the importance of UGC in your personal and professional life?" By this question, I'd like to understand how important UGC is for you, how it has been affecting your life, your profession, career and more from your own experience.... Do you believe (as Helen alluded) UGC is mainly rubbish and could be toxic for overall life?

Regards,
Mehmet Yildiz

What affects our attention so much?

Attention in our lives determine our success in certain context. Attention is affected by myriad of factors. However, one of the major ones which I have been observing (and recently confirmed by a study conducted at the University of Granada) is anxiety.

The article titled Anxiety Affects Attention Processes highlights that "Being of a nervous disposition and being anxious at a given moment affects our attention to what happens. This finding will help improve the treatment of anxiety disorders, so common in our days. In fact, anxiety has become one of the most common conditions among the population, which can explain the negative connotations usually associated to this term."

Dealing with anxiety in an efficient way may have tremendous affect in our life satisfaction as I believe that attention is the key enabler of this process. Wondering what else may have as much impact as anxiety for our attention? Could it be other strong emotions like fear, love and even other shades of anxiety?

Balance between the more and the less

After a complex problem resolution session, emotions on each person's face were getting more and more complex to describe with words. Definitions were mingling as obscurity prevailed. David believed in more emotions were better than less. He knew I trusted in simplicity however complex my endevours were perceived by others. Once he witnessed how I removed what was perceived as essential from a distance but were only verifiable with referencing fine knowledge and experience in specific setting. My replacement of the meaningful components in that certain context enabled him grant me such an unconditional support when I really seemed to need it at personal level to satisfy the thirst of contribution in a larger scope with higher impact. I was grateful to be given full accountability for re-engeenering a complex solution by taking possible failure responsibility with equanimity. At least by convincing the amygdala as discussed in my previous post as part of our limbic needs. My unique and perhaps the only differentiator in this ocean of talents ironically was the lack of the scary word "failure" in my personal vocabulary replaced by another word some may call it "experience". In a more simple sense, the more experience we gain the less fear we seem to experience, of course with an ongoing mindfulness of limbic systems. Having said that it is almost sunset time here...

Another stimulating phone conversation with Helen

It is a warm autumn Saturday in Oz. I have never heard Helen so enthused before to tell her dreams to me on the phone in the early morning. In fact it was the first time she told one of her dreams to me on a phone conversation like this surprisingly with a tag of importance. Helen has committed suicide in her dream last Thursday. She lucidly remembered to throw herself to the large ocean entry around the Cape Schanck Lighthouse Reserve in the Mornington Peninsula then turned into a Lavagirl in the middle of this vast ocean.

I knew why Helen was telling me this dream and she also told it to another friend (David). This dream triggered a number of memories and thoughts in me when I was listening to her on the phone. Four years ago in a warm January day, one of our most interesting collaborative idea was emerged whilst having a cup of tea with Vegemite sandwiches in the Keeper's Cottage after filling our lungs with fresh ocean air in over 2 hours of walk. Still remembering a fiery discussion between our joint friend David (a retired cognitive scientist) and Helen’s father Bruce (retired professor of anthropology) whether amygdalae were considered part of the limbic system. Helen was pressing Bruce’s sensitive buttons with evolutionary nonsense and I was pressing David’s with artificial intelligence theories ironically to witness how their amydalae were in function in this discussion which we called kind of a meta dream or type of dream in dream like life itself. And, when we finished drinking our tea, Helen mentioned later a piece of research news from Monash Uni where she did her first degree and where I did my masters. The study then revealed that patients with more severe social phobia showed a correlation with increased response in the amygdala which David re-iterated as “a marker of the effectiveness of pharmacological and psychological treatments”.

I knew the main reason of this dream for Helen was her recent initiative to prevent youth suicide in Australia which has been an important phenomenon. Helen made a number of shows to raise funds for her research in this area. As a person of golden heart, Helen also directly interacts with the disadvantaged young people in streets and loves them "until it hurts". She listens to their dreams and dreams about their dreams. And Helen, unlike mythological Altjira of our aboriginals, will not seem to retire when the "Dreamtime" vanished!

In my view, jumping over the ocean is a fascinating symbol for Helen as those who knew her resembled her shows to, a number of times, close to committing suicide. Of course, this was nothing new to Bruce when David who also heard Helen’s story and started conversation this morning with Bruce saying “Helen committed suicide” as a teaser. But Bruce is now immune to or more tolerant to uncertainties attacking his amygdala about Helen. What else could he choose in these circumstances! Don’t you think oceans and uncertainties tell us poignant and incisive stories about volcanoes in our minds and hearts!

Importance of compromises in our lives

As Emerson said for everything we have missed, we have gained something else, and for everything we gain, we lose something else. Life is about ongoing compromises. We trade off our resources constantly for our survival and add new meanings. Sometimes they are tangible and sometimes intangible.

It is interesting and important how we make decisions what to trade off. And it is important to be aware of this universal principle reflected in all walks of our lives. There are many factors affecting our decisions from constants to variables. As highlighted throughout the history, compromise can be seen a kind of sacrifice of a right or good thing in the hope of obtaining another one. The sad part (which we need to be cautious) is that we may end up losing both, I mean the compromised and the compromising goals; hence we need to be careful when we are making decisions and apply an intelligent risk assessment process based on the relationships of our needs, gains, goals and what we compromised. For example we see that through our compromises of tactical gains we neglected very important parts of our humanity such as human rights in some countries, collective creation and transformation which may lead us towards enlightenment.

Last week, I had to compromise my blogging and online social networking time to gain some different perspectives in life which will be important for me in the long term. There were almost no other areas for me to cut time and spend for my new transformation activity hence I have deliberately chosen blogging and social networking time because their impact on my life is seen less than the impact of my other goal; at least as an indication of my own risk assessment for this decision. Even though I missed the interaction of blogging and other social networking activities last 10 days, I am grateful about my choice, decision and the progress which produced satisfactory outcomes for me. How about you? How and what do you trade off for what reasons?

Philosophical clarity with atheistic pessimism for diagnosing unhappiness

I was talking with my wise yet controversial friend Helen whose real life stories I used to blog in another site but stopped with her final request. Even though she is very young (at her early twenties), Helen looks at things from multiple angles and has vast knowledge of philosophy and human psychology within sociological context with the practical sharpness. Her capabilities even challenge her father's many years of academic and corporate experience in dealing with a number of life situations.

When I asked Helen about recent issues related to her father, she diagnosed her father's recent unhappiness with two words (boredom and pain)which later I found borrowed from Arthur Schopenhauer who is known with his atheistic pessimism and philosophical clarity. She said Bruce was recently unhappy due to excessive boredom at emotional and severe pain at physical level.

First it was hard to conceptualize the scope of these two words and interrelationship for one's unhappiness within such complexity. When she gave me a number of examples related to her father's situation with thirst of unfulfilled material desires and link to our previous discussion on whether reason alone can unlock key answers about the world, I started seeing an unexpected yet pleasant light upon a dark issue in my perceived world too.

It was easier to relate to Helen's challenging thoughts as I used to read theories of Schopenhauer's in my early twenties as well. It was inspiring to understand views of an aesthetic pessimist relating to teachings of well known Buddhist, Vedanta and ancient Greek Stoic philosophers. And more importantly, Schopenhaeur always reflected something familiar for me with the intellectual and emotional taste of my favourite thought leaders like Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Borges, Wagner, Camus, Wittgenstein, Schrödinger, Einstein, and more...And his philosophical clarity was evident with sharp and wise remarks like "The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him” or metaphorically "Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.”

I learnt through Schopenhauer's analysis that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fulfilled! And it was amazing how empowering to have such a fundamental yet powerful piece of knowledge in early twenties which may even shed lights on senior citizens' complex issues.

What kind of privileged knowledge or insights have you obtained at your younger ages which you still use in your life for enlightenment or other purposes of your life?