There’s an official term in research for that couple you know (or perhaps have been a part of) that keeps breaking up and getting back together and breaking up again. These “cyclical relationships” account for 40 percent or more of college relationships according to one study, and some others claim up to 50 percent of adult relationships fit this mold to some degree.

From a report of the Kansas State University College of Human Ecology, quote:

“Findings showed that couples in a cyclical relationship tended to be more impulsive about major relationship transitions — like moving in together, buying a pet together or having a child together — than those not in a cyclical relationship. As a result, the couples in cyclical relationships tended to be less satisfied with their partner; had worse communication; made more decisions that negatively affected the relationship; had lower self-esteem; and had a higher uncertainty about their future together”

That same report also highlights that often times in these cyclical relationships, one partner or another is often uncertain about the status of a breakup, because it is unclear that the relationship has actually ended.

Of course, the official breakup often comes after — sometimes long after — one or both partners has decided that a relationship is pretty much over.

That period of time where something happens or something is realized that may end a relationship and when a decision is actually made. That stay/leave decision is often a time of high ambivalence — and a time that many people decide to stay in for a long period of time. Quoting from a Social Psychological and Personality Science journal article by Joel, McDonald, and Page-Gould: 

Across samples, the most common reason for wanting to stay in a relationship was emotional intimacy. Breach of trust (e.g., partner being deceptive or unfaithful) was commonly mentioned across all three samples as a reason for leaving the relationship.

It’s not usually clear-cut, thought. Quoting further from that same study:

Ambivalence was defined as simultaneous endorsement of the leave dimension and at least one of the two stay dimensions (approach or avoidance) with means above the scale midpoint; Between 47 and 52% of study participants met this definition of ambivalence.

In other words, if you’re not sure your relationship is over… well, you’re not alone. The research does say, however, that if you’re waffling, then getting back together again and again and again could be a sign that your relationship may not have the healthiest habits in other ways.

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It’s been a very rough few weeks – there’s been some major family medical issues and more. So let’s replay one of my favorite deep dive episodes – the one with Jennifer Dasal of the ArtCurious podcast.

We’ll be back in a few weeks, as soon as everyone is healed up and feeling better.

While retirement isn’t exactly a *new* idea in the world, the opportunity for everyone to retire isn’t exactly an old idea, either. There’s historical evidence that the Roman Emperor Augustus started paying pensions to Legionnaires who had served 20 years. Similar troop pensions were paid out after that by a variety of countries, but it wasn’t until 1684 that a Western, non-military public servant received a pension.  It was in 1865 that American Express offered the first employer-provided retirement plan, and 1935 that the United States launched social security.

Social security, though, is far from a secure system in the US. There’s been an increase of senior citizens living in poverty — As The Atlantic put it, quote:

Older Americans were the only demographic for whom poverty rates increased in a statistically significant way between 2015 and 2016, according to Census Bureau data. While poverty fell among people 18 and under and people 18 to 64 between 2015 and 2016, it rose to 14.5 percent for people over 65, according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which is considered a more accurate measure of poverty because it takes into account health-care costs and other big expenses.

You could spend days – no, lifetimes – digging in to why and how the retirement system that began in the 1800s in its modern incarnation has started to crumble — and the moral arguments about what a retirement should or could look like in a modern society.

For all of that study and debate, though, there’s also the fact that almost nobody in the US — and several other counties — are saving what would appear to be enough to eventually quit working entirely. There’s a lot of numbers and stats out there. One from the likely at least somewhat biased National Institute on Retirement Security found that, quote:

The average working household has virtually no retirement savings. When all households are included— not just households with retirement accounts—the median retirement account balance is $3,000 for all working-age households and $12,000 for near-retirement households.

The findings confirm that the American Dream of retiring comfortably after a lifetime of work will be impossible for many. Based on 401(k)–type account and IRA balances alone, some 92 percent of working households do not meet conservative retirement savings targets for their age and income. Even when counting their entire net worth, 65 percent still fall short.

Returning to the Atlantic, quote:

But even people who emerged from the recession relatively unscathed may have a hard time saving, according to a 2017 report from Government Accountability Office. Average wages, when adjusted for inflation, have remained near where they were in the 1970s, which makes it hard for workers to increase their savings. This has had a significant impact on the bottom 80 percent of workers, for whom average wages have remained relatively constant, even as income increased for the top 20 percent of households in the past three decades.

It’s a phrase that, conservatively, has been around since the time of the New Testament Bible — which means it was probably in use long before then. What started in the book of St. Matthew as “All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.”” became in 12 century Anglo-Saxon : “Although I do worse than I teach you, do not do as I do, but do as I teach you if I teach you well.” A book in 1546 put it as “It is as folke dooe, and not as folke say.” It wasn’t until 1689’s John Selden book Table Talk that the more familiar phrase was put to paper: “Preachers say, “Do as I say, not as I do.‘“

You could write off those that use this phrase as quote-unquote mere hypocrites — after all, they’re saying one thing and doing another. But there may be more to it than that. As one paper in the Journal of Family issues, entitled “Do as I Say, Not as I Did: How Parents Talk With Early Adolescents About Sex” pointed out, when a parent has children very young and then tries to convince those children that doing the same  themselves is a bad idea, it’s a much deeper desire. Specifically, to help protect their children from the difficulties and challenges that they themselves encountered. In other words — I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I know that I don’t want you to experience it to.

And when you’re talking about something as long-term as having and raising children — it’s a drum probably worth beating. When you’re talking about other difficult-to-learn or learned-the-hard-way lessons, though, that drive to protect others from challenges may just be counterproductive.

As Marianne Streger put it on the Open Colleges InformED blog:

research suggests that “the hard way” can at times be a more efficient teacher, and letting students struggle before offering guidance may lead to deeper conceptual understanding and the ability to transfer what was learned to new problems.

This phenomenon has been dubbed “productive failure” by instructional technology specialist and researcher Manu Kapur from the Learning Sciences Lab (LSL) at the National Institute of Education in Singapore.

Kapur explains that although it’s unlikely that students will be able to solve problems that require an understanding of concepts they haven’t learned yet, the process of generating sub-optimal or even incorrect solutions can be productive in preparing students to learn better from the teaching that follows.

I love this idea of productive failure. The idea that just because something was hard, or difficult, or challenging doesn’t mean that you should protect someone from it. Provide them the resources to work through it, yes — but not avoid it altogether.

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In 2010, the CDC reported that 40 percent of American parents with young children have delayed or refused one or more vaccines for their child. And in both the United States and across the world, this rise in unvaccinated people is having a big impact. As Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health pointed out, quote:

In 2014, the United States saw 668 cases of measles in 23 different outbreaks—the most measles here in nearly a quarter century. One of the largest outbreaks was linked to Disneyland in California, where kids, parents and park workers alike got sick. Consider that in 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared the disease “eliminated” in the U.S., thanks to a safe and effective vaccine developed more than 50 years ago.

There are a number of reasons someone may not get vaccines — there are a number of health issues that make vaccination impossible, such as being too young or too immunocompromised to get a vaccination. There are also many areas of the world where the refrigeration and sterile injection systems required for a vaccine are not readily available.

It’s also easy to write off those that don’t vaccinate as “crackpots” or “just silly” — and for those that are against vaccinations, it’s easy to write off those that support them as “stupid” or “brainwashed” — the gentlest terms I came across in my research.

As with many things, though, it’s an issue with a complex and storied past and present. As author Michael Willrich explained in the New York Times:

Public fear of vaccines did not originate with Dr. Wakefield’s paper. Rather, his claims tapped into a reservoir of doubt and resentment toward this life-saving, but never risk-free, technology.

Vaccines have had to fight against public skepticism from the beginning. In 1802, after Edward Jenner published his first results claiming that scratching cowpox pus into the arms of healthy children could protect them against smallpox, a political cartoon appeared showing newly vaccinated people with hooves and horns.

many people, […] saw mandatory vaccinations as an invasion of their personal liberty. An antivaccine movement began to build and, though vilified by the mainstream medical profession, soon boasted a substantial popular base and several prominent supporters, including Frederick Douglass, Leo Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw, who called vaccinations “a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft.”

In America, popular opposition peaked during the smallpox epidemic at the turn of the 20th century. Health officials ordered vaccinations […] club-wielding New York City policemen enforced vaccinations in crowded immigrant tenements, while Texas Rangers and the United States Cavalry provided muscle for vaccinators along the Mexican border.

Public resistance was immediate, from riots and school strikes to lobbying and a groundswell of litigation that eventually reached the Supreme Court. […]  opposition reflected complex attitudes toward medicine and the government. Many African-Americans, long neglected or mistreate

According to the World Bank, Globally, 69 percent of adults have an account, up from 62 percent in 2014 and 51 percent in 2011. Women make up just over half (55%) of unbanked people worldwide. While there’s a LOT of data that is correlational, as the University of Minnesota extension office explains it:

Research indicates that those who own bank accounts are more likely to own other assets including accounts related to savings, credit, and insurance. Consumers without a relationship with a mainstream financial institution also pay high transaction fees for services such as check cashing.

If you do utilize a financial institution, there are differences between the options. In the United States and several other countries — there are banks, and there are credit unions. Both offer a full range of financial services, both offer worldwide access to your money, and both offer money — but that’s where a lot of the similarities end.

Banks are for-profit institutions, and while there are large and small banks, they are, as a group, owned by shareholders with the specific purpose of making a profit. Those profits are funnelled from the wallets of the customers that, more often than not, are paying fees to access their own money to those that own the shares of the bank.

Alternatively, there are credit unions. These institutions offer more than credit, and you don’t have to be a part of a union. Instead, credit unions are not-for-profit and member owned. Rather than existing for the express purpose of profit, they exist for the purpose of serving members with lower loan rates and higher deposit rates. Usually credit unions also put a lot more of their money in to the community and community service.

I fully admit I am biased here. And while I try and keep this podcast as unbiased as possible, I’m just admitting that this situation is one I’m very emotionally close to — partially because for several years, I was unbanked and unable to get a bank account, thanks to a bad report on Chexsystems. It was a credit union that stepped in and helped me get an account — and it’s that same credit union that I work for today in my other life. Where you go for banking services matters — and I’d suggest looking into the option of a not-for-profit credit union that isn’t relying on you to make money for shareholders.

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In February of 2017, the official journal of the World Psychiatric Association published an article that collated the results of three longitudinal studies in three different countries that looked at the results of childhood bullying. That study found that, quote:

Studies indicated that young victims of bullying have higher rates of agoraphobia, depression, anxiety, panic disorder and suicidality in their early to mid‐20s, compared to those who have not been bullied in childhood. Child victims of bullying also have an increased risk of receiving psychiatric hospital treatment and using psychiatric medications in young adulthood. Another study found that victims of bullying in childhood report high levels of psychological distress at age 23 but, most importantly, also at age 50. Adults who were victims of frequent bullying in childhood had an increased prevalence of poor psychiatric outcomes at midlife, including depression and anxiety disorders, and suicidality. The effects were small, but similar to those of other adverse childhood exposures measured in that cohort study, such as placement in public or substitute care, or exposure to multiple adversities within the family.

Bullying is a serious issue that is just starting to be seen as such. That’s not to say, though,, that being made fun of about something and being bullied about something are the exact same thing. Being teased can often be used to reinforce a relationship when there is a pre-existing relationship. When it’s affectionate, it can build that interaction. When it’s aggressive, distressing, or intended to alienate however, that teasing can cross the line in to bullying. As the Canadian PrevNet puts it:

Teasing about physical appearance is almost always hostile and hurtful. This is not surprising since appearance has so much influence on social acceptance and is out of the individual’s control.

And when we’re talking about the internet, a sense of what’s teasing, what’s bullying, and what’s shaming can get a little thrown off. As Laura Hudson wrote in Wired:

We despise racism and sexism because they bully the less powerful, but at what point do the shamers become the bullies? After all, the hallmark of bullying isn’t just being mean. It also involves a power differential: The bully is the one who’s punching down. But a sense of proportion is crucial. These days, too many Internet shame campaigns dole out punishment that is too brutal for the crime. Using an influential social media account to call out individuals isn’t simply saying something is “not cool”; it’s a request to have someone put in the digital stocks, where a potentially unlimited number of people can throw digital stones at them. And it turns out to have real-life consequences for everyone involved.

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As humans, generally, we are not always great at defining what will be the most important to us in the future. After all, we tend to guess that things will turn out in a way that is more favorable to our wants, needs, desires, and interests than statistics may tell us they will.

For example, as Caroline Beaton wrote:

Between 1956 and 1962, the University of Cape Town psychologist Kurt Danziger asked 436 South African high-school and college students to imagine they were future historians. Write an essay predicting how the rest of the 20th century unfolds, he told them. “This is not a test of imagination—just describe what you really expect to happen,” the instructions read.

Of course, everyone wrote about apartheid. Roughly two-thirds of black Africans and 80 percent of Indian descendants predicted social and political changes amounting to the end of apartheid. Only 4 percent of white Afrikaners, on the other hand, thought the same. How did they get it so wrong?

Students’ predictions were more like fantasies. “Those who were the beneficiaries of the existing state of affairs were extremely reluctant to predict its end,” Danziger explains, “while those who felt oppressed by the same situation found it all too easy to foresee its collapse.”

Given that we are terrible at predicting the future, even when we could be considered “experts,” the things that are important to us now may or may not be the things that have the biggest impact on us in 10 years. Yet that doesn’t mean they aren’t important, stressful, or impactful now.

In the late 1960s, two researchers explored what current events have to do with predicting future illness. The Holmes And Rahe Stress Scale, officially known as Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) assigns a numerical value to life events. If you have a score over 300, then you have an 80% chance of experiencing a illness within a year. This has held true across cultures, ages, genders, and a number of other tests. A few of the most stressful events include:

Death of a spouse or family member, Divorce, Imprisonment, Personal injury or illness, Marriage, Dismissal from work, and more. This scale also accounts for cumulative stress.

Negative or positive, what’s important to you right now might change or might not. What I find very interesting to focus on is instead the things that may not change. Though he’s a problematic figure in many ways, Jeff Bezos has some very good advice here, even if it was originally intended for businesses. As Business Insider put it:

If you want to build a successful, sustainable business, don’t ask yourself what could change in the next ten years that could affect your company. Instead, ask yourself what won’t change, and then put all your energy and effort into those things.

Body size and it’s supposed connection to health isn’t a new thing in the world, but it has been a particular obsession in the Western World for the last hundred years or so. Quoting extensively from a Slate article by Harriet Brown:

Weight inched its way into the American consciousness around the turn of the 20th century. “I would sooner die than be fat,” declared Amelia Summerville, author of the 1916 volume Why Be Fat? Rules for Weight-Reduction and the Preservation of Youth and Health. (She also wrote, with a giddy glee that likely derived from malnutrition, “I possibly eat more lettuce and pineapple than any other woman on earth!”) As scales became more accurate and affordable, doctors began routinely recording patients’ height and weight at every visit. In 1949, a small group of doctors created the National Obesity Society, the first of many professional associations meant to take obesity treatment from the margins to the mainstream. They believed that “any level of thinness was healthier than being fat, and the thinner a person was, the healthier she or he was,” writes Nita Mary McKinley, a psychologist at the University of Washington-Tacoma. This attitude inspired a number of new and terrible treatments for obesity, including jaw wiring and stereotactic brain surgery that burned lesions into the hypothalamus.

100 years later, the diet industry is big business. Very big business. In 2014, a market research firm quoted by Fortune Magazine estimated that the industry as a whole was worth $64 billion. There’s no denying that dieting is big business — but it’s also a business in transition.  

Quoting from NPR’s report about shifts in the diet industry in 2016:

From summer 2014 to summer 2015, Lean Cuisine’s frozen meal sales dropped from around $700 million to about $600 million, or about 15 percent. Weight Watchers, Medifast and Jenny Craig have also seen revenues wither over the past few years. Sales of diet pills have dropped 20 percent in the last year, according to a report from Mintel, a market research firm. A survey of 2,000 people released by the firm in October found that 94 percent of respondents no longer saw themselves as dieters. They were also disillusioned with the industry: 77 percent of the consumers surveyed said that diet products are not as healthy as they claim to be, and 61 percent said most diets are not actually healthy.

But what IS actually healthy… that’s a whole different question. What’s sure is that diets as we’ve been doing them very rarely work. Traci Mann, who teaches psychology at the University of Minnesota and has been studying eating habits, self-control and dieting for more than 20 years, was interviewed by the Washington Post. In that i

In July of 2017, the Pew Research Center took a close look at online abuse. They found that, quote:

41% of Americans have been personally subjected to harassing behavior online, and 66% have witnessed these behaviors directed at others. In some cases, these experiences are limited to behaviors that can be ignored or shrugged off as a nuisance of online life, such as offensive name-calling or efforts to embarrass someone. But nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) have been subjected to particularly severe forms of harassment online, such as physical threats, harassment over a sustained period, sexual harassment or stalking. […] For those who experience online harassment directly, these encounters can have profound real-world consequences, ranging from mental or emotional stress to reputational damage or even fear for one’s personal safety.

Which is a very clinical way of putting into words the deeply scary and deeply threatening experiences some have had online. One of the most visible recently has been Anita Sarkeesian, founder of Feminist Frequency. She has been experiencing harassment, quote:

non-stop for half a decade – including a continuous barrage of rape and death threats, a bomb scare and a game in which players can punch an image of her face. It’s only when she speaks that she reveals a cautiousness most of us lack; Sarkeesian chooses her words carefully, ever mindful of what may spark even more abuse. “The biggest difference is that I don’t monitor our social media any more,” she says.

Unlike direct personal threats in person, online threats come with an added layer of deniability. As was explained in Wired:

trolls cast indiscriminate lines for and hide their intentions. They bait those fishing lines with what Judith Donath, a Harvard professor who has studied early internet deceptions, calls a “pseudo-naive” idiom: “I was just asking!” Standing on that plausible deniability, they sit back and wait for tempers to flare.

The online magazine Flare talked to several individuals who handle abuse on a regular basis. Quoting from that article:

“When I came out as trans, I was running a wedding business and I was having trolls leave fake reviews everywhere,” says Sophia Banks. “They were actually trying to harm my business and my income,” says the Montreal-based artist/trans advocate. “It was a really traumatic experience,” says Banks—a trauma that was compounded by the standard advice that urges victims not to feed the trolls.

“When we say, ‘just ignore it’ we are literally saying that we are forfeiting the Internet to abusers. We are saying this belongs to you and we just get to visit and that’s it,” says Julie Lalonde, Ot