https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/opinion/leftists-happy-coates-haidt.html

I read this interesting OpEd in the NYT yesterday about happiness that ends with this,

“Take the prominent review for Nature by a child development scholar, Candice L. Odgers, which cited American “access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation” as plausible causal alternatives to Haidt’s social-media diagnosis.

The tone of the review suggested that kids really ought to be a bit depressed. Wouldn’t you be, growing up amid “school shootings and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence”? And for an answer to this unhappiness, with neither Providence nor scientific socialism available, Odgers turned to the therapeutic process, lamenting the dearth of school psychologists to help kids process “their symptoms and mental-health struggles.”

This seems like where a good portion of the American left finds itself today: comforted by neither God nor history, and hoping vaguely that therapy can take their place.”

Comforted not by God or history,
I find comfort in the balance I see in nature.
Nature always finds a way to strike a balance, that has enabled life to continue evolving over the past 4billion years on this planet alone.

You?

How many species go extinct every year?

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural Science:  "Judging from the fossil record, the baseline extinction rate is about one species per every one million species per year.  

"Recent studies estimate that there are about eight million species on Earth, of which at least 15,000 are threatened with extinction.  It’s hard to pinpoint the exact extinction rate because many endangered species have not been identified or studied yet.  A number of scientists grapple with improving methods for estimating extinction rates.

"Regardless, scientists agree that today’s extinction rate is hundreds, or even thousands, of times higher than the natural baseline rate."




I'm happy when I can find two socks that match . . .

Some people need religion as an absolute binary moral to avoid moral dilemmas or thinking.