From & To Sathish #7 - Page 87

https://psyche.co/ideas/your-purpose-isnt-something-to-find-its-something-you-form

Your purpose isn’t something to find, it’s something you form

by Ross White, clinical psychologist

In my therapy office, I’ve found that to live with greater purpose, we must think differently about where it comes from

In my work as a clinical psychologist, I have supported numerous people who described feeling listless, apathetic, and lost in life. These clients often say they lack a guiding light to direct their efforts. ‘I’m searching for my North Star,’ one recently said. ‘Finding purpose in life’ is a commonly cited reason for seeking support. But years of clinical experience have taught me that trying to ‘find’ purpose can become part of the problem rather than the solution.

Before I explain, let’s first reflect on what purpose is. The preoccupation with living a purposeful life is as old as civilisation itself: scripts dating back millennia bear witness to religious deities and spiritual leaders (Krishna, the Buddha and the prophet Muhammad, to name a few) and a litany of ancient philosophers (such as Confucius, Laozi and Aristotle) who extolled the virtues of purpose. In more recent times, the existentialist school of philosophy identified purpose as a key ingredient in a meaningful life. Purpose is now widely understood as an enduring reason for being – a motivational force that guides our choices, gives meaning to our actions, and connects our lives to something beyond ourselves.

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who survived the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, had a profound influence on our contemporary understanding of purpose. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), Frankl wrote of his wartime experiences: ‘Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.’

Contemporary wisdom – perhaps influenced by Frankl’s idea of a ‘search for meaning’ – has resolutely identified purpose as something to be ‘found’. The author and speaker Simon Sinek has done more than most to popularise the importance of purpose in recent decades. His books, including Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team (2017), are international bestsellers. According to Google Ngram Viewer, which charts the frequency of a word or phrase in books, the use of the phrase ‘find your purpose’ has risen by more than 3,000 per cent in the past three decades. But this emphasis on finding purpose may inadvertently be thwarting people’s efforts to live purposeful lives.

In working with clients, I have noted several problematic implications of seeing purpose as something you must ‘find’. First, it implies that purpose is something you lack altogether. Becoming acutely focused on that perceived lack can breed anxiety. ‘Finding your purpose’ also suggests that your purpose should suddenly appear, fully formed, in brilliant clarity – a moment of joyous insight that arrives like a precious gem plucked from the earth. When that proves elusive, it can be frustrating and disheartening.

There are some other complications with this framing of purpose. It makes it seem as if, once you ‘find’ purpose, it is fixed – impervious to change. This can breed an attitude of conservatism where you might fret about ‘losing’ purpose and feel inclined to maintain a status quo rather than exploring other options. Finally, advice about ‘finding your purpose’ often casts purpose as a means to an end. In a remarkable feat of capitalist opportunism, the concept has been co-opted by entrepreneurial thought leaders and influencers, who promise to help you ‘find’ your purpose so you can monetise it by creating a business out of it.

In my experience, it is better to think of purpose as something you form, rather than something you find. This distinction helps my clients get moving from where they are now, instead of stalling because they feel lost about where to begin. The seeds of purpose are already there in ideas and interests that excite us – even if we haven’t had a chance to fully explore them – or in activities that bring vitality into our lives (however rarely). With the right conditions, these seeds can grow. Purpose requires cultivation.

Thinking about it in terms of ‘forming’ rather than ‘finding’ helps to emphasise important aspects of purpose:

Purpose is already present. ‘Forming’ purpose engenders a spirit of abundance rather than scarcity. You can work with what is already there, rather than searching for something that is not.

Purpose is a process. Understanding purpose as a work in progress can be helpful for managing feelings of frustration that arise when your efforts don’t deliver the outcomes you hoped for. Rather than being deterred by these feelings, you can instead understand them as an intrinsic aspect of living a purposeful life. Caring deeply about something opens you to experiencing the full gamut of emotions.

Purpose evolves. When you focus on ‘forming’ purpose, you are open to emerging possibilities and appreciative of the opportunities this can bring. Purpose, in this view, is not necessarily just one thing; co-existing ‘reasons for being’ can evolve at the same time (eg, taking care of our planet can coincide with serving family and community). The world around us – not to mention our inner worlds – can change rapidly, and our priorities can shift accordingly.

Purpose serves its own ends. Purpose is autotelic – it is its own reward and doesn’t rely on external incentives such as money, status or celebrity. Sure, these forms of reward may accompany purposeful living, but they are not the driving force behind it.

Forming purpose is a key focus in the work that I do with clients. One approach I employ to help them do this is an exercise that I call ‘A Day on Purpose’. I’ll illustrate this using the case of ‘Frank’ (whose story is inspired by clients I have worked with).

When we started our work together, Frank was in his mid-30s, happily married with a young son. He was working as an accountant in a private firm that he had founded with a friend. The first years of operating the business had been fraught with uncertainty, but the firm had now established itself as a profitable enterprise. In our first session, Frank described feeling low in mood and lacking in energy. He said he’d had to make sacrifices for his business and wondered if they were worth it. In one of our conversations, we discussed ‘A Day on Purpose’.

I asked him to imagine that he had a whole day free of doing the stuff he didn’t want to do, such as humdrum chores, and that he was feeling well rested and didn’t need a holiday. ‘Instead,’ I tell clients like Frank, ‘you can choose to use this day to do things that are both meaningful to you and have the potential to connect you to the world beyond yourself.’

We need to be deliberate in scheduling time to form our purpose and overcome practical barriers

The discussion then turns to answering a series of questions. I’ll share Frank’s answers, and perhaps you’d like to answer each of these for yourself, too.

How would you choose to spend that day?

After expressing some initial uncertainty, Frank said he would want to get outside – away from the office and away from screens. He used to go hiking when he was younger, spending hours in the woods or on trails. But focusing so much on his work meant that he hadn’t been able to do that as much as he would’ve liked to. He wanted to use the day to connect with nature more deeply again.

What matters enough for you to spend the day that way?

Frank said that spending time in nature would help him feel reinvigorated. For the past few years, life had felt very scripted – school runs, audit reports, ensuring staff got paid. Time in nature would help him break that script and connect with the bigger picture, allowing him to ‘see the wood for the trees’, as he aptly put it.

How would you know that it had been a day well spent?

Frank said he’d feel calm and grounded, and be more present in his interactions with his son and wife.

What difference, if any, would you hope that doing this might make?

Beyond the positive impacts it would have for him personally, Frank expressed hope that it would positively influence his son. He wanted his son to grow up knowing that life isn’t just about work. By modelling the importance of connecting with nature, he could teach his son the value of being outside and the sense of adventure it can foster. Frank also reflected on the possibility of starting a walking group for parents or families in the future to help get people outdoors together.

If you could have more of the feelings that spending a day this way would bring, would you want that?

This was an unequivocal ‘Yes’ for Frank.

Finally, take a moment to consider how you might do more of what you’d do on that day – even 1 per cent more – in your average week. What concrete actions could you take in the coming week to help you do that?

Frank answered that he could suggest to his wife that they take their son to a forest park that weekend. He also committed to checking if there were any local hiking groups he could join to build a sense of community with like-minded people interested in spending time in nature.

Thinking about ‘A Day on Purpose’ allowed Frank to understand how important spending time in nature – and helping others to appreciate nature – were for his sense of purpose. For other people, the activities that cultivate purpose, whether they are familiar or novel ones, will look very different (eg, for one person it may be making music, but for another it might be helping people in need). While efforts to tap into one’s purpose may involve pursuing lofty and challenging goals, they don’t have to (as in Frank’s case).

Whatever a person’s sources of purpose might be, the final question that I asked Frank is a key one. We, like him, need to be deliberate in scheduling time to form our purpose and overcome practical barriers that might arise. Forming purpose is about carving out opportunities for cultivation rather than waiting for a sudden discovery. That means doing what many of us often fail to do: thinking in specific, tangible terms about what brings meaning and vitality to our lives.

Ross White is a professor of clinical psychology at Queen’s University Belfast and the founding director of Strive2Thrive, a clinical psychology consultancy firm providing interventions and training to help individuals and organisations thrive. He is the author of The Tree That Bends: How a Flexible Mind Can Help You Thrive (2024).

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/12-books/the-dream-of-the-universal-library

The Dream of the Universal Library

Monica Westin

The Internet promised easy access to every book ever written. Why can’t we have nice things?

At the turn of the millennium, Google Books and similar mass digitization projects for the world’s print books were widely seen to promise a universal digital library for reading access on the web. Instead, the future we thought we’d get for human readers has arrived only for machines.

“Search changes everything,” declared Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, in his 2006 New York Times Magazine cover story, “Scan This Book!,” written a few years into the Google Books project. Kelly described a rosy future in which future digital books would be cross-linked and wired together to “flow into the universal library as you might add more words to a long story.” Kelly bemoaned how Congress’ then recent extension of copyright terms to the life of the author plus 70 years would keep much of the universal library dark, at least temporarily. But he predicted that copyright law would eventually “adapt,” as its reign would be “no match” for the technology of search. Ultimately, he thought, “the screen will prevail.” At that time — one of techno-optimism, predating the dominance of social media — this was the majority position.

The minority position was best expressed a few years earlier by Michael Gorman, then president-elect of the American Library Association. In a 2004 LA Times op-ed, he described Google’s newly announced project to mass digitize and make searchable huge numbers of books as an “expensive exercise in futility.” Because copyright limitations meant that much of what a reader could access would be only decontextualized snippets, Gorman argued, the project wouldn’t be useful for the dissemination of knowledge. “The books in great libraries are much more than the sum of their parts,” he wrote. Google Books, he predicted, would be a “solution in search of a problem.”

Twenty years later, Gorman’s take has proved more prescient than Kelly’s. The vast majority of Google’s digitized books exist as snippets stuck in a zombie state: under copyright but out of print. It is, however, one of the many absurdities of our moment that the company likely grants full access to most of the books in its archive to at least one party: its own LLMs. Other companies have settled for pirating — an option familiar to most non-institutional researchers. The social costs of keeping so many of the world’s digitized books locked away are far-reaching: knowledge gaps, weaker scholarship, stalled innovation, inequitable access, and market failure for the low-demand titles that have dropped off publisher backlists.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Almost all the infrastructure we now use to find, access, and read books in virtual environments — including the first mass book digitization projects, the metadata for making them discoverable, and the authentication processes for accessing credentials to read them — has existed for two decades. So why are the vast majority of digitized books still inaccessible on the web?

Ask almost anyone, and the answer you’ll get is “fair use.” Fair use is a doctrine that permits the limited use of copyright material. It is decided on a case-by-case basis, and it has shaped the major digitized book lawsuits of our time.

I argue that there is another approach. Instead of trying to rewrite copyright law itself, we could pursue common-sense reforms: nimble new licensing models that open up the digital stacks. The US proposed this approach a decade ago, and Europe has since put one into practice. We tried to build the universal library at a moment of digital optimism. This is the moment to try again.

Making the stacks virtual

The earliest digital libraries were developed in the 1960s by universities and military R&D groups. These connected relatively small sets of archived texts or abstract-only databases to basic information retrieval systems. As computing power became cheaper and network bandwidth increased, projects grew in scope and complexity. In 1971, Michael S. Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, digitized the text of the American Declaration of Independence and shared it with everyone on campus via local ARPANET, one of the earliest computer networks. The resulting project became Project Gutenberg, a web-based library of public domain books that’s often described as the first true online digital library.

By the mid-1990s, digital library projects linking basic library holdings information were starting to be developed across Europe and the United States. Among the best known was The European Library, a web portal launched in 1997 that hyperlinked the collections of several European national libraries. University libraries were also starting to create their own institutional repositories, often using homegrown software. These smaller digital libraries soon began to be quilted together through both aggregator sites and protocols for sharing data. The dream of the universal digital library, which could contain all online content and link it together, began to take form. But it still contained only a relatively tiny amount of full-text content.

Google, in fact, grew out of one such project. Larry Page and Sergey Brin began developing what would become Google search while they were PhD students working on the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project. The self-stated ambition of SIDLP was to be the “glue” connecting all digital content on the web into a comprehensive, functional collection.

By 2004, it seemed like all the components of a digital universal library were falling into place. New generation web search and indexing created the ability to find content via browsers. WorldCat, the world’s largest catalog for library collections worldwide, had just opened its records. Web crawlers now had a list of book titles, publication dates, and other key data. The rest of the backbone was solidifying. Optical character recognition (OCR) could turn scanned images into searchable text, while ASCII and HTML provided standardized formats that made text accessible in any browser and easy for search engines to index. Digitized books could finally be integrated into the wider web of knowledge.

The most important component, though, was the books themselves. Fresh off its IPO, Google announced at the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair their plans to index every book ever published, a project then called Google Print. Google invested massively in the project, which partnered with major research libraries at universities including Harvard, the University of Michigan, and Oxford. In exchange, library partners would typically get their own digitized copy of scanned volumes to preserve and use where law allows, such as providing full open access for public-domain items. Most of Google’s library partners added their digitized copy to HathiTrust, a digital library founded in 2008 by a consortium of research libraries that aggregates, preserves, and serves partner scans.

Other groups were also uploading scanned books to the web, but the only other organization working at the same scale was the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive had begun scanning books in 2004 and stepped up its pace in 2005. This included some scanning done as part of a consortial project called the Open Content Alliance, a partnership across the Internet Archive, many university libraries, and, for a short time, Microsoft, that sought to counter Google’s efforts. When the Open Content Alliance petered out, the Internet Archive kept up ambitious levels of book scanning on its own.

These projects captured the public imagination, but the legal problems were obvious early on. While technoutopians like Kelly viewed copyright law as a temporary obstacle, librarians, archivists, and especially attorneys recognized its likely intractability. US copyright law states that only the copyright holder can make and distribute copies of a work, with very limited fair use exceptions, such as excerpting quotes. In most circumstances, anyone making massive numbers of copies of books wouldn’t fall under fair use exceptions.

Both Google’s and the Internet Archive’s projects tested fair use in two major lawsuits. The entire online landscape bears their imprint today.

From the beginning, Google’s model had been to form independent agreements with library scanning partners and let the rights holders find out afterward. It likely would have come as no surprise to Google when the Authors Guild, the country’s largest professional organization for writers, filed a class action lawsuit for copyright infringement soon after the inception of the project. In 2008, Google and the Authors Guild proposed a settlement: Google would pay $125 million and set up a book rights registry, where rights holders could register their copyright claims for books. Google also offered to share future revenues with authors and publishers, as well as sell full‑text access to out‑of‑print books unless an author opted out. A judge threw out the settlement, arguing that this would give Google a near monopoly on the millions of still‑copyrighted “orphan” works, where the rightsholder can’t be located.

While the decision was controversial, had it gone differently it would have solved many of the problems we see today, including creating access to the vast majority of digitized books that are out of print but under copyright. Google was willing to make as many out-of-print, copyrighted books as accessible as possible and, critically, to create infrastructure that would allow opt-out processes to scale.

Google won on fair use exception grounds, but the victory — at least for those who dreamed of a universal library — proved pyrrhic. The judge ruled that letting end users see “snippets” constituted a transformative public good that didn’t compete with book sales. Some Google competitors and antitrust-focused groups claimed a win, but the ruling meant that, once again, it would be up to Congress to create a new legal vehicle for dealing with out-of-print copyrighted books, including orphan works. Congress hasn’t moved anything forward since.

More recently, the Internet Archive faced its own fair use exception lawsuit in 2020. The Internet Archive was one of many libraries and content platforms that had been experimenting with a new, legally unsettled approach to lending scanned books called controlled digital lending, in which libraries replace a physical copy of a resource they own with a digital copy in a “one for one” approach. For example, if a library owns one physical copy of Moby Dick, in a CDL model the library would scan the book and lend the digital copy made to one patron at a time while also removing the original physical copy of the novel from circulation.

But the Internet Archive veered wildly away from a measured approach to CDL when in March 2020, during COVID library closures, it enacted a short-lived “National Emergency Library” for its scanned books. For a few months, the emergency library allowed everyone to simultaneously borrow the same scan, abandoning the CDL one-copy, one-user model. In response, a group of major publishers filed a lawsuit (Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive). In March 2023, a federal court held that the Internet Archive’s scanning-and-lending program was not fair use. An appeal by the Internet Archive was overruled.

The way forward

These lawsuits on fair use exceptions to core copyright law remain the dominant frame for public conversations about digital book access. But it’s the wrong way to think about it. We don’t have to overhaul copyright law, or parameters of fair use, to solve the problem of access to most digitized books. We do need a practical framework to make them available through new licensing exceptions and governance in cases where they are commercially unavailable.

How big is this problem? The most common estimate is that 70% of all digitized books are neither in the public domain nor commercially available in print. Google has never published an up‑to‑date rights breakdown of its Books corpus, and the only hard numbers Google put on the public record came in during the lawsuit, when the first seven million library‑scanned books were under scrutiny. Of these, about one million were public domain, one million were under copyright and in print, and the remaining five million were under copyright but out of print, including many orphan works. No one has a clean way to license these, so they sit in legal limbo, inaccessible to everyone — except, perhaps, Gemini.

What’s needed for the 70% is a new common-sense licensing framework: a limited, opt-out system that lets a trusted body grant permission to use books no longer on sale, without taking away the authors’ rights so there’s a clear, reliable way to make them available. A new collective license model wouldn’t please copyleft activists who want to reform copyright altogether and would require some extra work from key groups to create processes for opt-outs. But it would better serve almost everyone else in the space, including librarians (like myself), who want to provide legal and low-risk access to their patrons and, of course, readers.

The EU implemented exactly this kind of “out-of-commerce” framework in its 2019 Digital Single Market directive, which was designed to create efficient online business operations across all EU member states. This included an “out-of-commerce works” regime that allows cultural heritage institutions to make such works available online once a license has been issued or if the rightsholder hasn’t opted out of a public notice. In practice, this means that if a work isn’t available through the ordinary marketplace, cultural heritage institutions like libraries can work with a collective management organization (the US equivalent of this would be the Copyright Clearance Center) to make them available — unless the rightsholder opts out.

To do this in the US, Congress would have to pass a new standard collective license framework. This would allow institutions like libraries and archives to make digital versions of in-copyright, out-of-commerce books in their collections available for reading online. The Copyright Clearance Center would be the obvious group to manage the opt-out registry and license admin, and libraries themselves to surface the content — the same major research libraries that worked with Google and other organizations to scan their books.

This is a complex but surmountable task. The Copyright Clearance Center would need to build a registry, a portal for posting notices and opt-outs, and a process to notify libraries about opt-outs. The work required of libraries would be low to moderate, depending on how automated the opt-out workflow would be.

This new model would deliver what the proposed Google Books settlement got right, including a rights registry and opt-outs. But we wouldn’t need a single private tech platform in charge to build it. And crucially, we wouldn’t have to rewrite the core of US copyright, including who owns what and how long it lasts, or expand definitions of fair use.

If this all sounds unrealistic, it’s first worth noting that the Copyright Office outlined just such an approach for mass books digitization in 2015 (Copyright Clearance Center CCC.pdf), issuing a report recommending that Congress authorize a pilot for exactly this type of extended collective licensing. Congress didn’t act.

These licenses exist for other media in the US. The music industry long had a compulsory license laid out in Section 115 of the US Copyright Act, which guarantees anyone the right to reproduce and distribute a nondramatic musical work as long as they follow the statutory rules and pay a set royalty. (This was most recently updated in 2021 by the Music Modernization Act in 2018, which replaced the original song‑by‑song “notice of intention” system with a blanket licence for streaming and downloads.)

Finally, we are already living in a moment when new type content licenses for books are being churned out at speed. The publishing industry is currently scrambling to develop new licensing models for full-text book access as lucrative data sources for AI. Just this September, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors and publishers after a judge found it illegally downloaded millions of copyrighted books from pirate libraries like Library Genesis. About 500,000 authors will receive $3,000 per work.

If we can negotiate grand bargains to keep feeding the machines books, surely we can design a rational, lean, humane licence that lets living, breathing readers borrow a digital copy of a work that they can’t buy. The universal library is near, but it’s up to us to ensure that humans, not just AIs, have a card.

Monica Westin is a writer and librarian who has previously worked at university libraries in the US and UK as well as at the Internet Archive and Google, and who will soon be working for Cambridge University Press & Assessment. These are her own views and don’t reflect those of her employers, past or present.

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/29/nx-s1-5646633/teens-ai-chatbot-sex-violence-mental-health?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_12_30&position=7&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=9f23be9e-bbb2-4b8d-b51c-e4a01ab97077&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2025%2F12%2F29%2Fnx-s1-5646633%2Fteens-ai-chatbot-sex-violence-mental-health

Teens are having disturbing interactions with chatbots. Here's how to lower the risks

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/dec/21/movies-resistance-politics?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_12_30&position=2&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=41b79003-ef5f-4e7a-973f-926bbb2856ba&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffilm%2F2025%2Fdec%2F21%2Fmovies-resistance-politics

From California to Tehran, this year has been about the films that resist

Films such as One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent and It Was Just An Accident celebrate the importance of fighting back against oppressive forces

https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cd6wyll5338o

Fireworks, drums and light shows: How the world is welcoming 2026

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/dec/26/secrets-body-clock-natural-rhythms-better-day?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_12_29&position=5&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=07794b77-e729-40d2-acec-240a10f13dd6&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Flifeandstyle%2F2025%2Fdec%2F26%2Fsecrets-body-clock-natural-rhythms-better-day

The secrets of the body clock: how to tune into your natural rhythms – and have a better day

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The Year in Billboard Chart Feats, By the Numbers: From 1 to 4.002 Million

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https://time.com/7341470/how-to-respond-to-how-are-you-when-youre-not-ok/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_12_23position=6&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=6cbcd4fa-64df-4814-a778-70adb4dac872&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftime.com%2F7341470%2Fhow-to-respond-to-how-are-you-when-youre-not-ok%2F

How to Respond to ‘How Are You?’ When You’re Not OK

by Angela Haupt

Haupt is a health and wellness editor at TIME.

If you would have seen Nora McInerny at her 35-year-old husband’s funeral, you might have thought she’d never looked better. That was the consensus “according to so many people,” she says, in part perhaps because she’d lost weight after barely eating for months—but also because she kept insisting she was absolutely, completely, totally fine.

That, of course, was a lie she was telling herself and others. “I felt the worst I ever felt, and I also felt nothing at all,” she says. “And what did I do? I just stood there and told everyone that I was fine, and I changed the subject. I told everyone I was fine to the point that everybody in my life believed me. ‘She’s doing great! Look at her! Look at her Instagram! She’s doing wonderful.’”

McInerny—author of books including It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool, Too) and No Happy Endings—hosts the podcast Thanks for Asking (previously known as Terrible, Thanks for Asking, a response that’s always on the tip of her tongue). Within six weeks in 2014, her father passed away, her husband died of brain cancer, and she miscarried her second child. It makes sense, then, how much time she’s spent pondering what to say when someone asks you how you are, and the truth isn’t “good.”

What’s the right response? We asked McInerny and other experts how to figure out what will feel best.

Flip the script

About a year ago, Jennifer C. Veilleux set a goal for herself: She would try never to answer “I’m fine” or “I’m good” if she wasn’t really feeling that way. When she catches those words rolling out of her mouth—which still happens occasionally—she corrects herself and tells the other person she's trying to avoid sticking to the script we all generally expect.

“We know what we’re supposed to say: ‘I’m fine, how are you?’ Yet that’s often not true,” says Veilleux, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, who studies emotion. “It’s now become a habit to try to reflect and say, ‘Well, how am I doing? Am I doing OK, or am I not? How can I answer this question in a way that reflects the reality of my moment?’”

Veilleux wants to avoid “expressive suppression,” or a tendency to hide feelings from other people. “It's holding up a smiling mask, when inside, things are crumbling,” she says. Research suggests that suppressing emotions is linked to increased anxiety, depression, and stress, as well as poor relationships. “Emotions are built to be expressed—that's one of their functions,” she says. When people get too used to holding them in as a way to cope or manage their feelings, “it’s associated with a ton of psychological problems.”

Since swearing off “I’m fine,” Veilleux has found that people react “really well” to her more honest responses. “I think we as human beings strive for connection and for belonging—it’s a core human need,” she says. “So to get a real answer to that question feels refreshing.”

First, gauge someone’s capacity for the truth

As a child-life specialist and therapist, Kelsey Mora specializes in supporting families impacted by illness, grief, and tragedy. “In other words,” she says, “often families who are ‘not OK.’”

It can be helpful to assess how ready the person asking you how you are is to hear the messy truth, Mora says—especially if they don’t already know what you’re going through. You might phrase it like this: “Are you prepared for the honest answer?” “Do you really want to know?” Or: “Do you want the long or short answer?” The point isn’t to shield or protect other people’s feelings from reality, she adds. It’s to ensure they’re capable of providing you with the support you need.

McInerny thinks of it as seeking conversational consent. Sometimes she’ll text her best friend and say: “Can I call you and have a full mental breakdown?” The answer might be “of course”—or it might be “certainly, but in 15 minutes.” “Then I don’t have to feel angry that she didn’t answer,” she says. “I don’t have to feel disappointed.”

Keep these handy responses close

Depending on how much you want to reveal, there are a variety of ways you can truthfully answer when someone asks how you’re doing. It’s not just what you say, but how you say it that matters. For example, Veilleux sometimes responds: “Honestly? I'm on the struggle bus right now—this week is a lot.” She says it in a positive tone and laughs in a “you know what that’s like” kind of way. People tend to commiserate, she’s found, and chime in: “I hear you! This time of year is rough.” “It’s honest, but it doesn’t require a lot of disclosure,” she says.

Veilleux also keeps these responses in her back pocket:

“I know I'm supposed to say I'm fine, but I'm not actually fine right now.”

“I’m upright—that’s about all I can say."

“Getting by .... barely.”

“Honestly, not that great.”

“I’m having a hard time right now.”

Each response is truthful, while inviting the other person to ask what's going on—without making them feel obligated to do so, she says. “You're either going to get the interested, compassionate, ‘Tell me more; you can dump on me’ response,” she says, “Or you're going to get the ‘Oh, bummer’ response, where the person is like, ‘I don't want your feelings right now.’” When the latter happens, you can try again with someone else who might have more capacity to listen, Veilleux adds.

Read More: 10 Ways to Respond to Someone’s Bad News

If you’re ruminating over what to say, keep in mind that the honest answer matters more than the "right" one, says Tyler Coe, who created How Are We Today?, a PBS sitcom that aims to help people talk about mental health more candidly. For a long time, Coe kept his experiences with bipolar disorder bottled up, never revealing how he was really feeling.

Now, when people ask him how he is, he pauses, assesses how he actually feels, and then answers truthfully. That might mean saying “I’m having a rough day” when he’s with a friend, or letting them know: “I’m not good right now, but I’m working on it.” He might also issue this warning: “Hey, I'm about to free-flow right here, but I'm just going to honestly tell you how I'm feeling.” If he’s at work, he might opt for “I’m managing.”

“The key is not performing ‘fine’ when you're not,” he says, while acknowledging that it probably won’t feel natural at first. “I’m truthful about how I am, but it's taken me my whole life to get to this point.”

Even when you’re not, “fine, thanks” sometimes does the trick

If you’re checking out at Target and the cashier asks you how you are—and the truth is that your life is in shambles—it’s probably best to simply say you’re fine. The same goes if you’re passing a colleague in the hallway and only have 30 seconds to get wherever you need to be.

There are other situations when it might make sense to stick to the script, too: If you’re talking to someone who has dismissed your feelings or been hurtful in the past, for instance, Veilleux says.

If you simply don’t want to talk about how you’re doing, you can protect yourself by saying “I’m OK,” Mora adds. She also likes this way of setting a boundary while still being authentic: "Honestly, it's been tough, but I'm not really up for talking about it right now." That can work well when you are, for example, about to give a presentation at work and can't afford to show up off-kilter. “It’s OK to say whatever you need to in order to function,” she says, as long as you find a way to let out your feelings at some other point.

Remember: most people care

When McInerny was struggling—yet telling everyone she was fine—she assumed they would be able to read her mind and just know how she was really feeling. “I thought that was a perfectly reasonable thing to expect,” she says. “I’m lying straight to your face, but I want you to somehow intuit that I'm lying to you.” She believed that by downplaying her grief, she was doing the right thing: “What is our national anthem in America? It’s ‘you’re fine, pick yourself up by your bootstraps; anybody can do it,’” she says. “If you can't, then it feels like a personal failing."

Yet if you keep concealing the truth from people, they'll believe you when you say you're OK, she says—and you’re not doing yourself or others any favors. Looking back, McInerny regrets forcing a smile instead of leaning on her friends. She hurt people who wanted to show up for her during her darkest days, she says, and had to work at repairing those relationships.

Read More: How to Reconnect With People You Care About

“I took away the opportunity for them to be the kind of friends that they are, and that they wanted to be to me,” she says. "That's what it means to be loved: If you knew someone you loved was struggling, wouldn’t you want to know the truth?”

As you consider how to respond when someone asks you how you are, and you’re not OK, McInerny urges: “Give people a chance, and let them love you.”

https://psyche.co/ideas/at-what-point-does-the-santa-myth-become-a-harmful-deception?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=252feaca27-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_12_26&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-8e23a7006c-838120577

At what point does the Santa myth become a harmful deception?

by Shayla Love

Exactly when and how children discover they’ve been duped makes an important difference to the revelatory experience

Towards the end of every year, many parents find themselves fielding difficult questions, such as: how does a man fly across the entire world in a single night to deliver presents? How does he fit down a chimney? Does he really eat cookies at every house?

Children start to distinguish fantasy from reality around preschool, but a belief in Santa Claus or Father Christmas usually lasts longer, to around seven or eight years old, according to research conducted in the United States in the 1980s and ’90s. This isn’t too surprising: many parents continue to tell their children that Santa is real for as long as possible, and they sometimes enact elaborate schemes to provide evidence of his existence. But, inevitably, there comes a time when cracks in the Santa story start to appear. If you’re a parent, relative or teacher and you’re interacting with children at this stage of their belief in Santa, you might be wondering about the best way to respond – or what the loss of belief might be like for them.

In 2014, a mother wrote in to Slate’s advice column Dear Prudence, written by Emily Yoffe, with concern about how to break it to her child that Santa was made up. The mother thinks that, once her daughter is old enough to ask questions about Santa, she should be told directly. ‘I feel very dishonest about this and worry that our daughter would feel hurt by the extreme steps we took to keep her in the dark just so we could enjoy the innocence and magic for a little while longer,’ she wrote. Yoffe responded that one of the ‘delights’ of childhood was to ‘spread a little fairy dust occasionally’ – but many readers subsequently wrote to the magazine describing how they had been hurt by believing in Santa well into puberty, because of how their parents had kept the myth alive.

Is it really possible that promoting the Santa myth to your children is a kind of harmful deception? To find out, a pair of psychologists, Candice Mills at the University of Texas at Dallas and Thalia Goldstein at George Mason University in Virginia, recently investigated how children and adults learned the truth about Santa, and how they felt about it.

A similar number of children recalled experiencing positive emotions upon learning Santa wasn’t real

For their paper in Developmental Psychology, they asked children aged six to 15 how they found out Santa wasn’t real, and the emotions they experienced afterwards. Then they asked 383 adults to remember how they came to disbelieve in Santa.

About a third of children and half of adults said they felt some negative emotions when they learned Santa wasn’t real. It was the child and adult participants whose parents had heavily pushed the Santa story who also tended to have more negative emotions upon learning the truth. The adults who remembered feeling the worst were at an older age when they learned about Santa, they tended to have found out abruptly, and from another person, rather than figuring it out on their own.

Yet a similar number of children, and around 13 per cent of adults, recalled experiencing positive emotions upon learning Santa wasn’t real. ‘Some said they were relieved that they finally had resolution to some of their nagging questions,’ Mills and Goldstein wrote in an essay for The New York Times in 2023. ‘Others reported pride, as if they’d solved a complicated puzzle.’

As well as the ethical aspects of exploding the Santa myth, understanding how and when children grow out of it offers a way to examine how children develop scepticism. According to Jean Piaget’s influential theory of cognitive development, when children are in a ‘preoperational stage’ and aged around four to eight, they can’t easily tell the difference between reality and fantasy. That ability emerges in the next stage – the ‘concrete operational stage’; in the 1970s, researchers suggested that losing the belief in Santa could mark a transition moment between these cognitive stages.

But back to the delicate issue of whether you should encourage or slow children’s understanding of the true nature of Santa Claus. ‘As developmental psychologists, we’ve long been interested in such questions, in part because they raise larger issues about the role of imaginative play in the life of a child and how parents might best engage with it,’ Mills and Goldstein wrote.

In their essay, Mills and Goldstein offered advice on how parents should talk about Santa with their children. If your children start asking probing questions, they said there is no need to tell them lies. ‘Consider answering by asking your child what she thinks, talking about what “some people” believe or simply acknowledging that she has asked an interesting question,’ they wrote. Even kids who are upset by suddenly finding out about Santa seem to get over it relatively quickly – usually within a year – and both children and adults said they would still incorporate Santa into their own holiday traditions.

‘Your child may have imaginary friends and believe in the Tooth Fairy – that’s OK,’ Mills and Goldstein wrote. ‘Blurring the line between fantasy and reality is a normal part of being a young kid.’

Shayla Love is a science journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. A former staff writer at Psyche, her journalism has appeared in Vice, The New York Times and Wired, among others.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/science-search-alien-life/

Why scientists can’t stop searching for alien life

There will always be “wolf-criers” whose claims wither under scrutiny. But aliens are certainly out there, if science dares to find them.

All throughout human history, we’ve gazed up at the stars and wondered if we’re truly alone in the Universe, or if other life — possibly even intelligent life — is out there for us to find. Although there have been many who claim that aliens exist and that we’ve already contacted them, those claims have all withered under scrutiny, with their claimants having cried “wolf” with insufficient evidence. Nevertheless, the scientific case remains extremely compelling for suspecting that life, and possibly even intelligent life, is out there somewhere. Here’s why we must keep looking.

Despite all we’ve learned about ourselves and the physical reality that we all inhabit, the giant question of whether we’re alone in the Universe remains unanswered. We’ve explored the surfaces and atmospheres of many worlds in our own Solar System, but only Earth shows definitive signs of life: past or present. We’ve discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets over the past 30 years, identifying many Earth-sized, potentially inhabited worlds among them. Still, none of them have revealed themselves as actually inhabited, although the prospects for finding extraterrestrial life in the near future are tantalizing.

And finally, we’ve begun searching directly for any signals from space that might indicate the presence of an intelligent, technologically advanced civilization, through endeavors such as SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and Breakthrough Listen. All of these searches have returned only null results so far, despite memorably loud claims to the contrary. However, the fact that we haven’t met with success just yet should in no way discourage us from continuing to search for life on all three fronts, to the limits of our scientific capabilities. After all, when it comes to the biggest existential question of all, we have no right to expect that the lowest-hanging branches on the cosmic tree of life should bear fruit so easily.

Each of the three main ways we have of searching for life beyond the life that arose and continues to thrive on planet Earth has its own sets of advantages and disadvantages.

We can access the surfaces and atmospheres of other worlds in our Solar System, enabling us to look for even tiny, microscopic signs of biological activity, including imprints left by ancient, now-extinct forms of life. But we may have to dig through tens of kilometers of ice to find it, or recognize life forms wholly unrelated to life-as-we-know-it on Earth.

With thousands of exoplanets now known, the imminent technological advances that will enable transit spectroscopy and/or direct imaging of Earth-sized worlds could lead us to discover living planets with unmistakable biosignatures in their atmospheres. If life thriving on an Earth-sized world is common, positive detections are only a matter of time and resources.

And searches for extraterrestrial intelligence offer the most profound rewards: a chance to make contact with another, perhaps even a technologically superior, intelligent species. The odds are unknown, but the payoff could be unfathomable.

For these (and other) reasons, the only sensible strategy is to continue to pursue all three methods to the limits of our capabilities, as without superior information, we have no way of knowing what sorts of probabilities any of these methods will have of yielding our first positive detection. After all, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and that saying certainly applies to life in the Universe.

From a cosmic perspective, the laws that govern the Universe as well as the nature of the components that make it up indicate that the potential for life as a common occurrence might be absolutely inevitable. Initially, at the start of the hot Big Bang, our Universe was hot, dense, and filled with particles, antiparticles, and radiation moving at or indistinguishably close to the speed of light. In these beginning stages, neither the ingredients nor the conditions necessary for chemical-based life were in place; the Universe was born life-free. And yet, as time went on, the potential for biological activity would rise and rise.

As the Universe expanded and cooled, the following steps sequentially occurred:

the particles and antiparticles annihilated away, leaving a tiny excess of matter behind,

quarks and gluons formed bound states, giving rise to protons and neutrons,

fusion reactions occurred, creating the light elements,

atoms formed from these atomic nuclei and the surrounding bath of electrons,

gravitational contraction and collapse takes place, giving rise to stars,

star clusters and other clumps of matter attract, forming galaxies,

and within those galaxies, successive generations of stars are formed, creating heavy elements.

Once a galaxy becomes enriched enough with these heavy elements, the new generations of stars that follow can form with rocky worlds within those stellar systems, many of which will have the potential for life.

Within our observable Universe, since the dawn of the hot Big Bang, sextillions of stars have formed. Of those, the majority of them are found in large, massive, rich galaxies: galaxies comparable in size and mass to the Milky Way or greater. By the time billions of years have gone by, most of the new stars will have sufficiently large fractions of heavy elements to lead to the formation of rocky planets and molecules that are known as precursors to life. These precursor molecules have been found everywhere, from comets and asteroids to the interstellar medium to stellar outflows to planet-forming disks.

And, at this critical step, we find ourselves face-to-face with the end of our scientific certainty.

Where, and under what conditions, does life come into existence?

On those worlds where life arises, how frequently does it survive and thrive, persisting for billions of years?

How often does that life saturate its habitable regions, transforming and feeding back on its biosphere?

Where this occurs, how often does life diversify, becoming complex and differentiated?

And where that occurs, how frequently does life become intelligent enough to become technologically advanced, capable of communicating across or even traversing the vast interstellar distances?

These questions aren’t merely there for us to philosophically ponder; they’re there for us to gather information about, and eventually, to draw scientifically valid conclusions about such probabilities.

Of course, there are plenty of valid explanations for why we haven’t succeeded in our searches for life just yet. The most sobering — and the most pessimistic — is that it’s possible that one or more of the steps required to give rise to the type of life we’d be sensitive to are particularly difficult, and only rarely can the Universe achieve them. In other words, it’s possible that any one of life, sustained life, complex and differentiated life, or intelligent and technologically advanced life are rare, and none of the worlds we’ve surveyed possess them. That’s a possibility we have to keep in mind so long as we’re committed to remaining intellectually honest.

But there’s no reason, at least so far, to suspect that’s the primary reason we haven’t discovered life beyond Earth just yet. The old saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” applies wherever the odds of success are unknown, but we have every indication that success is possible under the right circumstances. Here on Earth, the evidence strongly indicates that our home planet is an example of such circumstances, and hence it’s likely that there are places all throughout space and time where life sustains itself, evolves to become complex and differentiated, and achieves a level of technological advancement sufficient for interstellar communication.

The big unknowns are in the probabilities of the various types of alien life that are actually out there, not in the question of whether such achievements are possible within our Universe.

That doesn’t mean that we should take seriously every claim that’s been made — even by scientists — that alien life has been found. The “Wow!” signal, for example, was a high-powered radio signal received over the span of 72 seconds back in 1977; although its nature is unknown, it has never been replicated, either back at the original source or anywhere else. Without confirmation or repeatability, we can draw no affirmative, definitive conclusions.

Fast radio bursts, like many signatures observed astronomically, appear in many locations both in and out of our galaxy, but have no indication that they were intelligently created; they are likely simply a natural astronomical phenomena whose origins have yet to be determined.

NASA’s Mars Viking lander conducted numerous tests for life on the Martian surface, with one experiment (the Labeled Release experiment) giving a positive signature. However, the possibility of contamination, the lack of reproducibility, and the lack of a verified follow-up experiment has cast tremendous doubt on the “biological positive” interpretation of the experiment.

And despite the possibility of encountering interstellar space probes, direct alien contact, or even the ubiquity of alien abduction stories, no robust verification of any of these claims has ever come forth. We have to keep our minds open while at the same time remaining skeptical of any grand claims. The conclusions we draw can only be as strong as the supporting evidence for them.

It’s primarily for these reasons — we have every indication that the Universe has all the necessary ingredients for life, but no indication that we’ve found it just yet — that it’s so vital to keep looking in a scientifically scrupulous way. When we do announce that we’ve found extraterrestrial life, we don’t want it to be another instance of crying “wolf” with insufficient evidence that we’ve found a wolf; we want the claim to be supported by overwhelming, unassailable evidence.

That means building fleets of orbiters, landers, sample-return missions, and laboratory-equipped rovers to explore a wide variety of worlds in our Solar System: Venus’s atmosphere, Mars’s surface, Titan’s lakes, and the oceans of Europa, Enceladus, Triton, and Pluto, among others.

That means building superior coronagraphs on world-class space-based and ground-based telescopes, considering the construction of a starshade, and investing in transit spectroscopy. By imaging the atmospheres and surfaces of exoplanets, including breaking down their molecular and atomic constituents and abundances over time, we should be able to identify any world with a life-saturated biosphere.

And that means continuing to search, with greater precisions and sensitivities across the electromagnetic spectrum, for any signals that might come from an intelligent species seeking to communicate or announce their presence.

If you don’t find fruit on the lowest-hanging branches, that doesn’t necessarily mean you give up on the tree; it means you find a way to climb higher, where the fruit may be present but out of your present reach.

This might also include expanding our searches for extraterrestrial intelligence. While most searches focus on far-reaching radio transmissions, it’s possible that alien civilizations who seek to communicate across the stars and galaxies will rely on a different technology. Perhaps we should be monitoring the tails of water maser lines or the 21 cm spin-flip transition of hydrogen. Perhaps we should be looking for patterns in pulsar signals, including correlating signals between pulsars. Perhaps we should even be looking for extraterrestrial intelligences in gravitational wave signals that we have yet to discover. Wherever a signal can be encoded by a sufficiently advanced species, humanity should be looking and listening.

There are also avenues to explore that won’t reveal alien life, but could help us understand how it arose and arises throughout the Universe. We can recreate the atmospheric conditions found on other worlds or even as they were on Earth long ago in the lab, with an eye toward recreating the origin of life-from-non-life. We can continue exploring the possibility of having nucleic acids (RNAs, DNAs, even PNAs: peptide-based nucleic acids) coevolve with peptides in an early prebiotic environment: perhaps the most compelling candidate for how life first arose on Earth.

The rewards of finding out that we’re not alone in the Universe would be immeasurable. Perhaps we could learn how to survive the great environmental threats that face us: hazardous asteroids, a changing climate, or violent space weather events. Perhaps there are even more important lessons to be learned about how to overcome our own insufficiencies as human beings: the great challenge of moving beyond our primal nature. Perhaps other civilizations have success stories to offer us, recounting how, in the early days of their technological infancy, they overcame such issues as:

overconsumption, where they devoured their planet’s resources beyond the point of sustainability,

short-term thinking, where they addressed the immediate, urgent problems at the expense of long-term ones that threatened their existence,

or the emergence of disease, famine, pestilence, and ecological collapse, resulting from the global changes wrought by a post-industrial society.

Our impulses toward greed, plunder, and self-gratification may not be unique, and there may be more experienced, wiser species out there that have figured out solutions that elude us today. Perhaps, if we’re lucky, they may have lessons waiting-in-the-wings for us that could guide us toward a more successful future.

Many of us can imagine two different futures unfolding for the enterprise of human civilization. There’s the one we should strive to avoid: where we resort to infighting, squabbling over the limited resources of our world, descending into ideologically-driven wars and ensuring our own eventual destruction. If we never find life beyond Earth — never find anyone else to communicate with, exchange information and culture with, and to give us hope that there’s a future for humanity out there among the stars — perhaps extinction will indeed be our most likely outcome.

But there’s another possible outcome for humanity: a future where we come together collectively to face the gargantuan challenges facing humans, the environment, planet Earth, and our long-term future. Perhaps the discovery of life beyond Earth — and potentially, of one or more intelligent, spacefaring, extraterrestrial civilizations — might give us not only the guidance and knowledge we need to survive our growing pains, but something far grander than any terrestrial achievements to hope for. Until that day arrives, we must make do with the knowledge that, at present, we have only one another to extend our kindnesses and compassion to.