Over the past decade, and especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more Americans have reoriented their lives in accordance with Stoicism.
Stoicism sought what the Greeks called eudaimonia: wellness of being, or ‘the good life’. The Stoics taught that, by practising their set of exercises, practitioners could learn to see the world from a universal perspective, understand their place in it, and freely and dispassionately assent to carry out the duties imposed upon them by fate.

The Resurgence Of Stoicism

Stoic happiness comes from wisdom, justice, courage and moderation – all states of the individual soul or psyche, and therefore under our control. Everything else is neither good, nor bad. While these beliefs about daily life rested on a foundation of physical and metaphysical theory, the attraction of Stoicism was, and is, in the therapeutic element of its exercises: cognitive behavioural therapy, or Buddhism, for guys in togas.

A Fake Sense Of Happiness

Despite the benefits of Stoic spiritual exercise, you should not become a stoic. Stoic exercises, and the wise sayings that can be so appealing in moments of trouble, conceal a pernicious philosophy.Stoicism may seem a solution to many of our individual problems, but a society that is run by stoics, or filled with stoics, is a worse society for us to live in. While the stoic individual may feel less pain, that is because they have become dulled to, and accept, the injustices of the world.

The Problem With Stoicism

Stoicism responds to real injustices such as slavery by pointing out that we are all at least metaphorically enslaved. In doing so, it elides and occludes the real horrors of a slave society – or of our own wildly <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/are-the-persian-gulf-city-states-slave-societies">unequal</a> world.The world stands in the middle of a pandemic, a climate crisis, and, in many countries, our own crises of (at least quasi-) democratic self-governance. It may be tempting to embrace a philosophy that counsels us not to be sad, not to mourn the things we’ve lost, to accept all that happens as fate, and to do our duty even as the world crumbles around us.

Stoicism Makes Us Powerless

We should mourn our families when bad things happen to them, our cities when they are threatened, our houses when they burn or flood. It is <a href="https://psyche.co/ideas/seeing-grieving-as-learning-explains-why-the-process-takes-time">not easy</a> to feel grief, and it is tempting to seek out <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/why-stoicism-is-one-of-the-best-mind-hacks-ever-devised">exercises</a> to suppress it. But to look around the world and feel the pain of injustice, to understand and wallow in the hurt of the natural world – this is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of humanity, and the first step towards taking action. Because if you accept your fate joyfully, as a Stoic sage should, you’ll never try to change it.

Beyond Stoicism: Action

Stoicism might help you as an individual. But we need a philosophy that doesn’t dull us to the injustices of the world

philosophy

Philosophy

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History

Don’t be stoic: Roman Stoicism’s origins show its perniciousness | Psyche Ideas

While some people understandably got tired of working from home during the pandemic, my time as a digital nomad has given me the opposite experience. There’s nothing like time spent trying to be productive from hotels and cafés to make you appreciate the benefits of a home office.If you’re thinking about taking off for far-flung locations so you can keep your job while seeing the world, think of this as a checklist of things to prepare for—and a warning that it won’t be as glamorous as you may imagine.

Work From Home Is Way Better Than A Digital Nomad

When you hit the road, you’re not bringing an ergonomic chair or standing desk with you. The chances that you’ll be able to set up a workstation that’s comfortable are slim, so prepare for <a href="https://ehs.unc.edu/workplace-safety/ergonomics/office/">back and neck pain</a> and carpal tunnel syndrome. That’s just for starters. You can’t do much to control the lighting, so you’re likely to experience eye strain as well. And temperature control can be evasive—during my months in Mexico and South America, I was almost never able to get a room to a comfortable temperature. This damages sleep as well.

Physical Discomforts And Time Spent Adjusting For Working

There’s a good chance that you need faster internet and more bandwidth than you realize. And an even better chance that you’ll have difficulty finding it when you travel. Most coffee shops and hotels that offer Wi-Fi often can’t match what you’re used to in an office or at home. This is especially true if you’re like the millions of people who keep <a href="https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/570709/yes-you-have-too-many-tabs-open-your-computer-and-your-brain-probably-blame">lots of tabs</a> open at once.

Wi-Fi Strength And Reliability

There’s also the crucial matter of security. Using public Wi-Fi can expose your information, and that of your employer, to hackers. It’s important to use technology like a VPN to protect your data. But there’s also the matter of “<a href="https://www.aura.com/learn/how-to-protect-your-personal-information-on-social-media">shoulder surfing</a>,” in which people nearby see what you’re typing. Hackers prey on digital nomads, and some have gotten very good at disguising what they’re up to.

Unsecure And Unsafe

In most American offices and restaurants, workers can count on a basic level of sanitation to be kept up—partly due to health codes. But in some other places, it’s just not the same. Unclean restrooms, unavailability of certain diet choices and food poisoning from water are quite possible. Be careful, and beware.

The Adventurous Outdoors: Sanitation Issues

Mosquitoes and spiders are a big nuisance while travelling and working across the world.The clamour of traffic, crowds, construction, nearby airports, and more can make it especially difficult to take calls or do Zoom meetings. Sound can also dramatically <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4844473/">decrease productivity</a> when you’re trying to concentrate, and noise-cancelling headphones can’t get rid of everything. Continuous <a href="https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/noise-pollution-health-effects#mental-health">noise pollution</a> can also make you more irritable and stressed.

Bugs And Noise

Some other digital nomads we encountered on our travels are the definition of lonely. Many people working remotely, even from home, have <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90544975/4-major-long-term-psychological-effects-of-continued-remote-work">wrestled with</a> loneliness in recent years. But in tourist sites, such as coastal cities and towns, where people are working remotely, they run into a tricky situation. Vacationers show up looking for a quick fling, but the digital nomads are looking for deeper connections and real conversation. It can lead to frustration.

Loneliness and Hookup Culture

Most people are likely to be most productive and have the best work experience when they’re stationary and within the comforts of a home office.A digital nomad sounds cool, and has the perks of going to new places and meeting new people. But when work is supposed to be done, nothing beats home!

The Verdict

Sometimes, there’s no place like home for the best remote work experience, says a tech professional after working abroad in Mexico and South America.


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Remote Work

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Career

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Travel

The digital nomad life is not all it’s cracked up to be. Here’s why

<ul><li>First, it means nothing from our past can come back and embarrass us.</li><li>Second, it makes it harder for advertising companies to keep track of what we're up to online.</li><li>And third (in the case of files and emails at least), it frees up space for new stuff.</li></ul>

Why clean it up?

Deleting older messages frees up storage space and makes future searches faster too.In the case of Gmail, there's no automatic way to wipe old emails, so you'll need to remind yourself to do it regularly. The search term you need to put in the box at the top of the web interface is "older_than:" followed by your time period. Use "older_than:1y" to find emails older than a year, for instance, or "older_than:6m" to find emails older than 6 months.With the search results on screen, you can select all the matching messages (use the check box to the top left) and erase them.

Emails

Twitter is the social network that you're probably most interested in when it comes to expunging older messages, and it's also the one that offers the most tools for the job. If you want to keep a copy of your messages on your computer before you wipe them from the web, you can download your archive by opening <a href="https://twitter.com/settings/account">Twitter Settings</a> on the web and choosing Your account and Download an archive of your data.Two of the best auto-delete tools we've come across are <a href="https://tweetdelete.net/">TweetDelete</a> and <a href="https://tweetdeleter.com/">Tweet Deleter</a>,  Jumbo for <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jumboprivacy">Android</a> & <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jumbo-privacy-security/id1454039975">iOS</a>, which can delete old posts on both Twitter & Facebook once they reach a certain age

Social Media

Deleting older files you have stored in the cloud is less about protecting you from the prying eyes of others and more about keeping yourself organized (and limiting the amount of money you spend on cloud storage every month).In the case of <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/">Dropbox</a> on the web, you can quickly view and remove the oldest ones by sorting them by their modified date (use the tick boxes on the left to select files, then click the three dots and Delete to wipe them).For <a href="https://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a> on the web, look for the Last modified column heading. Use Ctrl+Click to select multiple files then the trash can icon to delete them

Files

There are plenty of reasons to declutter your online traces. Here’s how to tidy up.

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Parenting

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Problem Solving

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Time Management

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Cybersecurity

How to Clean Up Your Digital History

An overly intense focus on a goal can lead to what cognitive psychologists call goal neglect. That may seem counterintuitive to the average goal-oriented MBA or entrepreneur, but take, for example, the dynamic at work in micromanagement. 
Often, when leaders micromanage employees, an intense focus on task performance distracts those leaders from the larger goals of the company. They obsess over the trees and neglect the forest—and drive employees crazy while they’re at it.

Too Much Focus On The Goal

Where you direct your focus is a function of the brain’s attention system. This system has three subsystems:
<ul>
<li>The flashlight (or orienting system), which enables you to selectively direct and concentrate your attention;</li>
<li> The floodlight (or alerting system), which enables you to take in the larger picture;</li>
<li> The juggler (or executive function), which enables you to align your actions to your aims.</li>
</ul>

The Three Ways Of Focus Direction

Meta-awareness is the simultaneous awareness of your focus in the present moment and of the limits of that focus. 
It allows us to more fully understand where we sit within the situation. It is the firefighter’s consciousness of where his attention is directed in the moment, which, in turn, enables an awareness of what he might be missing.

Meta-Awareness

We know we can become aware of where our mind is, but oftentimes it’s triggered by some external thing, like taking the wrong exit off the freeway and realizing, ‘Oh my gosh, my mind was totally somewhere else.’ What we want to do is elicit that checking-in quality in our minds with more regularity.Leaders, especially, don’t want to have to make mistakes to align their focus. Instead, they engage in mental practices that train them to watch their minds, moment by moment.

Becoming Aware Of Your Awareness

Imagine sitting on a riverbank on a big boulder that’s sturdy and stable, and watching the contents of your conscious experience flow by as if it were the water itself. You’re not going to go chase every leaf or every fish or whatever you see flowing down the river; you’re going to watch it passing by. You hone meta-awareness by watching your stream of consciousness.

The River of Thought

Like many mindfulness exercises, the River of Thought feels at odds with the decisive, action-driven orientation often ascribed to great leaders, but that is the whole point.It allows us to take a very different stance toward our experience. It’s very rare that we experience something as neutral observers. We usually have a story or an opinion about it, and we’re jumping to action. That can serve leaders poorly. If they make up a story that’s incorrect or jump too quickly in the wrong direction, it’s going to mean trouble.

The Non-Action Approach

Watching your mind wander without engaging is easier said than done. But learning to be more conscious of where you are directing your attention—and ensuring that wherever you are focused in a particular moment is the right place to be—seems well worth the effort.Really exceptional leaders are aware of where their mind is moment by moment, and that means they know when they are vulnerable.

The Bottom Line

University of Miami neuroscientist Amishi Jha explains why and how leaders should hone their meta-awareness.

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Productivity

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Personal Development

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Mindfulness

Pay attention to your attention

Navigating through the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 caused organisations to work remotely and find ways to cut spending. However, companies significantly increased their spending on digital technologies for employees. Over 50% of midsized companies increased their spending in this area, and 69% plan to increase their digital tools in 2022. Yet, many of these investments will not generate substantial business impact because they lack a sustained and successful focus on improving digital dexterity.

Increased spending on digital technologies

Digital dexterity is the mindset and behaviours that accelerate digital business transformation. The pandemic showed the importance of digital dexterity for company success. Face-to-face interactions, paper-based processes and analogue tasks vanished and were replaced with digital constructs. A 2018 survey found an open mindset and agile ways of working are vital for optimised digital dexterity. However, only 16% of leaders and 9% of employees have high digital dexterity.

Digital dexterity

<ul><li>Leaders need to communicate the organisations need for digital dexterity.</li><li>They should ensure that workflows, incentives, budgets, and policies promote digital dexterity.</li><li>Organisations should build digital capabilities such as collaboration, data literacy, workflows, and information creation and retrieval.</li></ul> The goal is complete transparency with employees about the right tools to use and the expected digital skills.

Laying the groundwork for digital dexterity

<ul><li>Show employees the value of digital dexterity. Employees are more inspired to develop a skill when they see how it will serve them.</li><li>Foster digital dexterity by connecting employees to people or projects that can help them build new skills in practice.</li><li>Organisations can identify employees to act as "digital translators" to help guide leaders and employees.</li><li>Encourage employees to coach others in key digital skills on the job.</li></ul>

Building digital dexterity in the workforce

The hybrid era means employees need to be more comfortable than ever with tech. Here’s how to help them develop the skills they need.

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

How to Build Digital Dexterity Into Your Workforce

There’s an ingrained mythology around startups that not only celebrates burn-out efforts, but actually requires it. It’s the logical outcome of trying to compress a lifetime’s worth of work into the abbreviated timeline of a venture fund.It’s not hard to understand why such mythology serves the interest of money men who spread their bets wide and only succeed when unicorns emerge.

Trickle-down workaholism in startups

If you want to understand why so many startups become infected with unhealthy work habits, or outright workaholism, a good place to start your examination is in the attitudes of their venture capital…

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Money & Investments

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Technology & The Future

The computing industry progresses in two mostly independent cycles: financial and product cycles. Financial markets get a lot of attention. They tend to fluctuate unpredictably and sometimes wildly. The product cycle by comparison gets relatively little attention, even though it is what actually drives the computing industry forward.

What’s Next in Computing?

In the mainframe era, only large organizations could afford a computer. Now processors and sensors are getting so small and cheap that there will be many more computers than there are people.

Hardware: small, cheap, and ubiquitous

A lot of the excitement in AI has focused on deep learning, a machine learning technique that was popularized by a now famous 2012 Google project that used a giant cluster of computers to learn to identify cats in YouTube videos. Deep learning is a descendent of neural networks, a technology that dates back to the 1940s. It was brought back to life by a combination of factors, including new algorithms, cheap parallel computation, and the widespread availability of large data sets.

Software: the golden age of AI

There are a variety of new computing platforms currently in the gestation phase that will soon get much better — and possibly enter the growth phase — as they incorporate recent advances in hardware and software. Although they are designed and packaged very differently, they share a common theme: they give us new and augmented abilities by embedding a smart virtualization layer on top of the world. Here is a brief overview of some of the new platforms: cars, drones, the internet of things, wearables, VR and AR.

Software + hardware: the new computers

The computing industry progresses in two mostly independent cycles: financial and product cycles. There has been a lot of handwringing lately about where we are in the financial cycle. Financial…

Coined in 1956 by Dartmouth Assistant Professor John McCarthy, ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a general term that refers to hardware or software that exhibits behavior that appears intelligent.Basic ‘AI’ has existed for decades, via rules-based programs that deliver rudimentary displays of ‘intelligence’ in specific contexts. Progress, however, has been limited — because algorithms to tackle many real-world problems are too complex for people to program by hand.

Artificial intelligence

Machine learning (ML) is a subset of AI. All machine learning is AI, but not all AI is machine learning. Interest in ‘AI’ today reflects enthusiasm for machine learning, where advances are rapid and significant.The goal of most machine learning is to develop a prediction engine for a particular use case. Machine learning algorithms learn through training.

Machine Learning: offloading optimisation

Some of the most effective machine learning algorithms beyond deep learning include:<ul><li>‘random forests’ that create multitudes of decision trees to optimise a prediction;</li><li>‘Bayesian networks’ that use a probabilistic approach to analyse variables and the relationships between them; and</li><li>support vector machines that are fed categorised examples and create models to assign new inputs to one of the categories. </li></ul>

Effective machine learning algorithms

Deep learning involves using an artificial ‘neural network’ — a collection of ‘neurons’ connected together.An artificial neuron has one or more inputs. It performs a mathematical calculation based on these to deliver an output. The input-output function can vary. A neuron may be:<ul><li>a linear unit (the output is proportional to the total weighted input;</li><li>a threshold unit (the output is set to one of two levels, depending on whether the total input is above a specified value); or a</li><li>sigmoid unit (the output varies continuously, but not linearly as the input changes).</li></ul>

How does deep learning work?

Example applications of AI include the following; there are many more.<ol><li>Reasoning: Legal assessment; financial application processing; games; autonomous weapons systems.</li><li>Knowledge: Medical diagnosis; media recommendation; purchase prediction; financial market trading; fraud prevention.</li><li>Planning: Logistics; scheduling; navigation; physical and digital network optimization.</li><li>Communication: Voice control; assistants, and customer support; real-time translation of written and spoken languages; real-time transcription.</li><li>Perception: Autonomous vehicles; medical diagnosis; surveillance.</li></ol>

Why is AI important?

From Amazon and Facebook to Google and Microsoft, leaders of the world’s most influential technology firms are highlighting their enthusiasm for Artificial Intelligence (AI). But what is AI? Why is…