Bonjour! Welcome to this week's digest. This is a very special "I'm thirsty" edition, because I am in a drought of discovering new information sources. So a quick question for you, dear reader - What is your favorite daily or weekly information source? (besides TD Digest, obvi ;D) I would love to learn what else you love to consume, from The Economist to The Soup (RIP) (...and maybe not Infowars). Thank you for sharing! I will publish the top sources for everyone's benefit next week.


Source: Gfycat
This week's topics include friendship and love (and heartbreak), the value of stepping outside of ourselves to see the world, and the importance of seeking out complex, uncomfortable information to enrich our worldview. Enjoy!

• TOPIC OF INTEREST - MY MENTAL HEALTH REMINDERS
   
• BLOG POST - Brain Pickings:  David Whyte on the True Meaning of Friendship, Love, and Heartbreak by Maria Popova
   
• BLOG POST - The Story of My Life by Russ Roberts
   
• ARTICLE - Aeon: Loneliness is the common ground of terror and extremism by Nabeelah Jaffer
   
• BLOG POST - Solutions Journalism: Complicating the Narratives by Amanda Ripley
   
• BLOG POST - Above the Market: Proof Negative by Robert Seawright
   
• MUSIC - Torn by Natalie Imbruglia

• Speak to myself like I would speak to the people I love (because I love myself, too).
   
• Be accountable and reliable to myself like I would to the people I love (because my needs are important, too).
   
• Give myself permission and opportunity to fail (ideally while pushing my boundaries).
   
• Can I simultaneously be effective, while also being present and kind to myself?
   
• Appreciate my fears for what they are, and be curious about Just Do It, opening myself to more options, and understanding the physical manifestations of fear. Stay and investigate the fear / anxiety to unlock playfulness and creativity. Ask myself - What's the worst that can happen? So what? So what? So what?
   
• Remember to embrace flexible expectations of life, including a large buffer for shit happens.
   
• Transform anger or resentment into compassion, empathy, and interconnection within the moment.
   
• Patience is a motherfucker... and sometimes the best response.
   
• Remember the Cleveland Clinic empathy video - What is the line of context over every single person's head that I don't know about?
   
• Don't forget that feeling of being unconquerable and unflapped in the face of fear, doubt, and uncertainty. I can face my demons and the darker realities of life with perseverance via my own will, processes & tools, and other support structures. I have to let myself and my people be there for me.
   

• Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them.
   
• ...heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.
   
• Love may be sanctified and ennobled by its commitment to the unconditional horizon of perfection, but what makes love real in the human world seems to be our moving, struggling conversation with that wanted horizon rather than any possibility of arrival. The hope for, or the declaration of a purely spiritual, unconditional love is more often a coded desire for immunity and safety, an attempt to forgo the trials of vulnerability, powerlessness and the exquisite pain to which we apprentice ourselves in a relationship, a marriage, in raising children, in a work we love and desire.
   
• Love is the conversation between possible, searing disappointment and a profoundly imagined sense of arrival and fulfillment; how we shape that conversation is the touchstone of our ability to love in the real inhabited world.

• Only now, as I’m older, do I realize that I had mostly unconsciously crafted a set of narratives about myself and that those narratives in turn affected how I lived from day to day.
   
• Inevitably, if you see yourself as the main character of your own reality show and people around you as part of the supporting cast, you miss a big part of life.
   
• We relate to other people, but not on an exactly equal footing. If I’m not careful, it’s about how I feel more than about what you feel. If I’m not careful, it’s about how your actions affect my story and not the other way around. And even when my role is just someone in the chorus, I inevitably make it seem bigger than it really is. I inevitably take myself a little too seriously.
   
• My idea here is that there is something of a struggle going on in our psyches and that we can choose to some extent how we perceive our daily experiences. One choice is to see ourselves as fundamentally atomistic, heroic, and essentially, existentially lonely. The other is to see ourselves as connected and belonging to something with that belonging at the center of the experience.
   
• Some of the most powerful moments in my life have come from listening rather than talking. Really listening. Giving someone my fullest attention without thinking of what I am going to say next, allowing someone who needs to connect with another human being the chance to open their heart. That turns out to be a much more glorious and transformative drama than the one where I’m the main character.

• True loneliness means being cut off from a sense of human commonality and therefore conscience. You are left adrift in a sea of insecurity and ambiguity, with no way of navigating the storms.
   
• Totalitarian ideas offer a ‘total explanation’ – a single idea is sufficient to explain everything. Independent thought is rendered irrelevant in the act of joining up to their black-and-white worldview.
   
• The act of ‘joining up’ to an absolute ideology involves a kind of winnowing. It happens when someone begins to see the world through the lens of a single story.
   
• The breakdown of pre-modern political institutions and social traditions had created societies in which people had ‘no place in the world, recognised and guaranteed by others’, and – crucially – no sense of belonging. Society is the mirror in which we see ourselves. Finding our place within it – in ‘the trusting and trustworthy company of equals’ – helps us to understand our own identities, to know ourselves, and to trust our own thoughts.
   
• Tom’s narrative has no need of facts. They are beside the point. Like other ideas that aspire to ‘total explanation’, the narrative pretends ‘to know beforehand everything that experience may still have in store’. Armed with omniscient knowledge of the ‘true’ cause for all events, believers are relieved of their sense of insecurity. Here, at last, is a consistent explanation for everything. Totalitarian ideas emancipate their believers from reality: their worth lies in presenting a coherent absolute narrative of the world, which, as Arendt noted in Origins, is ‘more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself’. Experience is irrelevant: there is nothing new to be learned about the situation.

• In this dynamic, people’s encounters with the other tribe (political, religious, ethnic, racial or otherwise) become more and more charged. And the brain behaves differently in charged interactions. It’s impossible to feel curious, for example, while also feeling threatened. In this hypervigilant state, we feel an involuntary need to defend our side and attack the other. That anxiety renders us immune to new information. In other words: no amount of investigative reporting or leaked documents will change our mind, no matter what.
   
• The cost of intractable conflict is also predictable. “[E]veryone loses,” writes Resetting the Table’s co-founder Eyal Rabinovitch. “Such conflicts undermine the dignity and integrity of all involved and stand as obstacles to creative thinking and wise solutions.”
   
• The lesson for journalists (or anyone) working amidst intractable conflict: complicate the narrative. First, complexity leads to a fuller, more accurate story. Secondly, it boosts the odds that your work will matter — particularly if it is about a polarizing issue. When people encounter complexity, they become more curious and less closed off to new information. They listen, in other words.
   
• In the midst of conflict, our audiences are profoundly uncomfortable, and they want to feel better. “The natural human tendency is to reduce that tension,” Coleman writes, “by seeking coherence through simplification.” Tidy narratives succumb to this urge to simplify, gently warping reality until one side looks good and the other looks evil.
   
• Recommendations for complicating the narrative: 1. Amplify Contradictions; 2. Widen the Lens; 3. Ask Questions that Get to People’s Motivations; 4. Listen more, and better; 5. Expose People to the Other Tribe; 6. Counter Confirmation Bias (Carefully)

• In his fascinating book, On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton systematically and convincingly shows that certainty is a mental state, a feeling like anger or pride that can prove useful, but that doesn’t dependably reflect anything like objective truth. One disconcerting finding he describes is that, from a neurocognitive point of view, our feelings of certainty about things we’re right about is largely indistinguishable from our feelings of certainty about things we’re wrong about. All of which confirms the (usually unspoken) truism about humans – we’re often wrong but never in doubt.
   
• Inductive reasoning, which is an extrapolation from the information we observe in order to arrive at a conclusion about something that we have not observed, cannot offer definitive results. However, it is how science must be done in a universe that is open... Because induction is necessarily the way science works and advances, uncertainty is inevitable...
   
• As Dr. Johnson remarked to Mrs. Thrale: “It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world.” With scientific reasoning, we move from idea to hypothesis to theory..., with (inductive) “proof,” meaning correlation, consistency and noncontradiction. Such conclusions, no matter how powerful, are always subject to modification or even outright rejection based upon further evidence gathering.
   
• We want deductive (demonstrative, definitive) proof. Because we love certainty, it often feels (wrongly) like we have deductive proof. We are desperate for sure-fire, black-and-white, lead pipe locks. Such sure-things are incredibly rare in the real world, despite what salespeople and politicians tell us. In the real world, we usually have to settle for inductive (tentative) conclusions, as inductive logic is anything but guaranteed... Accordingly, the great value of evidence is not so much that it points toward the correct conclusion (even though it often does), but that it allows us the ability to show that some things are conclusively wrong.
   
• We should be spending much more of our time focused upon a search for disconfirming evidence for what we think (there are excellent behavioral reasons for doing so too). As the great Charlie Munger famously said, “If you can get good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift."
   

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