Category Archives: User Behavior

The Most Canadian of Social Networks

It may be the most polite social network in the world. It’s Hey.Cafe – a Facebook alternative built by Canadians for Canadians.

I first heard about Hey.Cafe through a reel on Facebook (oh, the irony) from Tod Maffin, a former CBC radio host, author and podcaster. Prompted by the not so veiled threats coming from south of the border, Tod’s been on a “buy Canadian” campaign for several months now and that has recently extended to Canadian alternatives for the big social media platforms. It was Tod that suggested to every Canadian listening (currently about 10,000,000 a week, according to Tod’s website) that we check out Hey.Cafe.

So, I did. It turned out that Anthony Lee, the creator of Hey.Cafe, lives about an hour down the highway from me, here in the heart of beautiful British Columbia. So I reached out and we had a chat – a nice, polite Canadian chat. Because that’s how we do things up here.

The first thing I learned, which was a surprise, is that Hey.Cafe is not new. In fact, it’s been around since 2001. That means there was a version of Hey.Cafe before there was ever a Facebook (which started in 2004). In addition to running a tech support company out of Penticton, BC, Anthony has been developing alternatives to the major social media platforms for the better part of 3 decades now, “Whenever I thought, ‘Oh, I think I have an idea,’ I’d make some changes, that kind of stuff. But it definitely wasn’t a sit down and work on it all day thing, unless I had some time free that I was just like, ‘Yeah, I’ll spend this week working on stuff.’”

Then I asked the obvious question, “Why now? Why is Hey.Cafe suddenly gaining attention?”

There is the “buy Canadian” thing, of course. But Anthony said it’s more than just Canadians being fed up with an American president and his bluster. We’re also fed up with social media founders that have their noses firmly pressed up against said President’s posterior simply because it’s good for business.

And let’s not even get into the simmering cesspool every major social media platform has become, driven by an ad-obsessed business model that monetizes eyeballs at the expense of ethics. Lee concurred, “It’s all about algorithm for them. They don’t care if it’s someone you follow or not. If, if it looks like it’s gonna make some attention, whether it be good or bad, they’re gonna push it in the feed.”

So, are Canadian’s kicking Hey.Cafes tires like a rink-side Zamboni? Yes, finally. Thanks to the plug from Tod Maffin, users shot up from about 5,000 to over 40,000 in two weeks. And it’s still growing. Because it’s still a side of the desk project, Anthony had to cap new accounts at 250 an hour.

Now, those numbers are infinitesimal compared to any of the major platforms, but they do signal a willingness by Canadians to try something not tied to business practices we don’t agree with. At the same time, it does bring up the elephant in the room for anyone going up against Facebook or any of the big platforms – the curse of Metcalfe’s Law. Metcalfe’s Law – named after Ethernet pioneer Robert Metcalfe – says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users. Having a telephone isn’t much use if no one else has one. For networks, bigger = better. And Facebook is currently 75,000 times bigger than Hey.Cafe.

Given that, does Hey.Cafe stand a chance? I hope so. I supported it with a one-year subscription because I would love to see Anthony Lee’s side project survive and – hopefully – succeed. I did go on and post a few things. I even started a new “café” – Hey.Cafe’s version of a Facebook Group. So far, nothing much has happened there, but we’ll politely wait and see. Again, that’s how we do things up here.

What I did find, however, is a community that seems genuinely, politely happy to be there. And not all of them are Canadian. This was a post from a nurse newly arrived from the U.S.: “Newly landed nurse practitioner from Oregon via Boston (long story). Love the concept of no ads and AI. Now to find some other communities, Bernese Mountain Dogs and skiing!”

I did ask Anthony, given the audience MediaPost (where this post also runs) reaches, if there’s any message he’d like to pass on. For media buyers especially, he offered this, “Whether it be HeyCafe, Bluesky, Mastodon, (consider) using more services that aren’t the big three players. Use more stuff that puts you in the spotlight of communities that are all over the place.”

While Anthony would love for Hey.Cafe to be economically sustainable, maybe the take-away here is not so much about financial success. Maybe these are Canadians signalling a change in our attitude. It’s as if we’ve been in an abusive relationship with Facebook for years but have put up with it because it’s been too hard to leave. But, at some point in abusive relationships, there comes a red line which, when crossed, you begin planning your exit. It doesn’t happen immediately. It may not happen at all, but there is a significant mental shift that happens where you become aware of how toxic the relationship really is and you start planning a life free from that toxicity.

For 40,000 Canadians and wannabe Canadians – at least – that switch may have happened.

A Silver Lining from Northern Places

Journalist Thomas Friedman had a pretty stark open for his recent New York Times opinion piece: “The last year has been one of the most depressing of my nearly 50 years as a journalist”

But if you got past that – he soon presented a silver lining:  “But then I spent time in my native state, Minnesota, after something else that I’d never seen in nearly 50 years: a spontaneous uprising of civic activism propelled by a single idea — I am my neighbour’s keeper, whoever he or she is and however he or she got here.”

I don’t think it’s happenstance that this emerged in Minnesota, one of the most northernly states in the US. I have spent a fair amount of time in the Minneapolis – St. Paul area on business. On those trips, I found something very familiar there, a sense of – for lack of a better word – “Canadianism.”  Minnesota “Nice” felt very close to Canadian “Polite.”

In the piece, Friedman wrestled with a verb that was also new to him – “neighbouring.” He described it as “a basic human impulse to look out for your neighbours and, yes, dig their cars out of the snow on Monday because you know they will do the same for you on Wednesday.”

I think there’s a correlation between neighbouring and living in the North. When you live in a place where the weather can kill you, you’d better be able to count on the people who live next door to you. As Friedman said, “Minnesotans are winter people. Don’t come for winter people in winter. They’re not afraid of the cold. Just the opposite. The weather has forged a unique Minnesota neighbourliness”

The same is true – I would say – from coast to coast to coast (we have three) in Canada. I have written about this before. When almost half the year is a matter of survival, you tend to huddle together to fight the common foe.

Northerly = Neighbourly

Weather has a way of tying you to your geography.  It forces you to define community – at least in part – by those who live in the same area as you. You naturally bond with the people who will help you shovel your driveway, loan you six eggs if you’re snowed in or invite you in on a frosty morning for a cup of hot coffee (and, in Canada, a shot of rye). It is the great common denominator. For many months every year, weather is the number one topic for everyone that lives in the North.

Canada and the Northern states are not unique in this regard. The same is true for the Nordic Countries in Europe. And this translates into many good things in terms of civic engagement. The World Happiness Report has consistently found the same pattern, commenting in their 2020 report: “No matter whether we look at the state of democracy and political rights, lack of corruption, trust between citizens, felt safety, social cohesion, gender equality, equal distribution of incomes, Human Development Index, or many other global comparisons, one tends to find the Nordic countries in the global top spots.”

Neighbouring and Systemic Trust

But there is not a one-to-one correlation between the Northern parts of North America and Northern Europe. In my example of the connection between distance from the equator and civic cohesion, you could rightly say there are anomalies. For example, the politics in the Canadian province of Alberta and states south of the border in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and the Dakotas bear little similarity to the politics of British Columbia, Washington, Minnesota or Maine. Yet all of those lie in the North. And what about Alaska, which is solidly “Red?” You can’t get much further north than Alaska.

“Neighbouring” isn’t about politics. It can be misleading to conflate the two. Being a good neighbour isn’t unique to the right or left. I grew up in rural Alberta and I can tell you from experience that if you need help from your neighbour, Alberta is a pretty damned good place to be.

But there is something else happening in those places – the remnants of a “cowboy” ethic and a feeling of distrust breed by generations of alienation from the power bases thousands miles away in the eastern regions of the country. This is true both in Canada and the U.S. In this case, geography is our enemy. Big, spread-out countries have a tough time keeping everyone happy at the same time. This leads to distrust of the system and the federal government. Chances are your neighbours feel the same way as you do.

But what Minnesota did show us is the basic human dyad – the relationship between two people who happen to be in the same place at the same time. – is still very much alive and well. We still band together when threatened from the outside. But these social connections are like muscles – the more they’re exercised the stronger they get. It just happens that in places where winter is more severe, we are more used to relying on our neighbours to overcome a common threat. That is why Minnesota taught us a timely lesson in what it means to be “neighbourly.”

Walk with Me, Talk with Me

In Aaron Sorkin’s acclaimed series, The West Wing, there was a recurring plot device. Characters, when faced with a thorny problem, often went for a walk and talked it out. The camera would capture it all in a long tracking shot.

Sorkin, who penned most of these scenes, used them to highlight the frenetic energy and pace of the White House. The characters exchanged rapid-fire, Sorkinesque dialogue while moving through spaces crammed with busy people buzzing in the background. The technique was – at the same time – both expository and transitional. It would move the story from location to location, often introduce additional characters as they joined the walk, then would veer off to do something important while it also furthered the story line with new details. It was the physical embodiment of multi-tasking, adding urgency to the pace, “There is so much to do and so little time to do it in.”

While Aaron Sorkin might not have intended it, there is also some solid neuroscience backing up the practice of walking and talking. And, as it turns out, you don’t even need to be walking with someone else to realize the cognitive benefits of a good stroll around the block.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Nietzche seemed to be on to something. To come up with something new, the brain must do two different types of thinking: divergent and convergent. Divergent thinking could be defined as “thinking outside of the box.” Convergent thinking would be gathering up all those divergent thoughts and stuffing them “back in the box” to analyze the best option. According to a 2014 study from Stanford University, walking gives a significantly positive boost to divergent thinking but is less effective with convergent thinking.

Walking appears to open up the brain to new ideas. There is a positive “mind-body” effect that comes from just being active while you’re thinking, but walking also puts you in a different environment with varying stimuli. In the Stanford experiment, some participants walked outside and some just walked on a treadmill. Those that were outside realized the greatest creative boosts. 

But what if you’re walking with someone else? That’s where the benefits of walking really kick into high gear for certain kinds of brain activities. First of all, both the walkers are benefiting from the creative boost that walking gives you. But it also appears that walking allows you to connect with your fellow walker on both a physical and psychological level that operates at the subconscious level. 

Another study (Cheng, Kato, Saunders, Tseng, 2020) found that walkers soon synchronize their walking and this creates a physical bond between them. Those that walked together each evaluated the other person more highly after the walk than those that simply sat in the same room together. And, in case you’re wondering, the two didn’t even need to talk to each other. In the case of this study, both walkers were specifically instructed to stay silent during their walk.

That’s the “walk” part. But what about the “talk” part? As it turns out, walking brings its own benefits to that as well, and it’s not just the multi-tasking saving of time that Aaron Sorkin showed in the West Wing. 

Think about where you’re looking when you walk. The person you’re walking with is beside you but you’re looking ahead. You’re not looking them in the eye. For some types of communication, eye-to-eye might be the optimal mode, but for divergent thinking, this combination of being physically “in step” with the other person but also being free to let your eyes and mind wander a bit, enticed by what’s happening around you, turns out to be a very effective creative incubator. Your flow of fresh thoughts are not restricted by picking up negative micro-expressions from the other person. You’re not picking up any body language that may cause you to repress any creative ideas for fear of rejection. Soon, you’ll start to riff off each other’s ideas, adding to the idea generation process. 

There’s one more thing about walking. If you do need to just think for a while to process a new idea, those silences are a lot less awkward if you’re walking than if you’re across from each other at a boardroom table.

How Seniors Get Sucked into Falling for Bad Information

It happened to me last Thursday. I was tired, I was jet lagged and I was feeling like garbage. My defenses were down. So, before I realized it, I was spinning down a social media sewer spiral. My thumb took over, doom scrolling through post after post offering very biased commentary on the current state of the world, each reinforcing just how awful things are. Little was offered in the way of factual back up, and I didn’t bother looking for it. My mood plummeted. I alternated between paranoia, outrage and depression. An hour flew by as my brain was hijacked by a feckless feed.

And I know better. I really do. Up in my prefrontal cortex, I knew I was being sucked into a vicious vortex of AI slop and troll baiting. Each time I scrolled down, I would tell myself, “Okay, this is the last one. After this, put the phone down.” And each time, my thumb would ignore me.

This is not news to any of us. Every one of you reading this knows about the addictive nature of social media. And you also know the pernicious impacts of AI generated content spoon fed to us by an algorithm whose sole purpose is to hog tie our own willpower and keep our eyes locked on the screen. I also suspect that you, like I, think because we know all this, we have built up at least some immunity to the siren call of social media.

But I’m here to tell you that social media has gotten really, really good at being really, really awful for us. I didn’t notice it so much when I was on my game, busy doing other things and directing my attention with a fully functional executive brain. But the minute my guard slipped, the minute my cognitive capacity shifted down into a lower gear, I was sucked into the misinformational sh*thole that is social media.

Being a guy that likes to ask why, I did exactly that when the jet lag finally dissipated. Why did I, a person who should know better, fall into the crappy content trap?  “Maybe,” I said to myself reluctantly, “it’s a generational thing.” Maybe brains of a certain age are more susceptible to being cognitively hijacked and led astray.

A recent study from the University of Utah does lend some credence to that theory. Researchers found that adults older than 60 were more likely to share misinformation online than younger people. This was true for information about health, but a prior study showed an even higher tendency to swallow bad information when it came to politics.

Lead researcher Ben Lyons set out to find why those of us north of 60 are more likely to be led astray by online misinformation. Spoiler alert – it doesn’t have anything to do with our brains slowing down or lower information literacy rates. It appears that older people can sniff out bullshit just as well as younger people. But it turns out that if that information, no matter how dubious it is, matches our own beliefs and world view, we’ll happily share it even if it doesn’t pass the smell test.

Lyons called this congeniality bias. I’ve talked before about the sensemaking cycle. In it, new information is matched to our existing belief schema. It it’s a match, we usually accept it without a lot of qualification. If it isn’t, we can choose to reject it or we can reframe our beliefs based on the new information. The second option is a lot more work and, it seems, the older we get the less likely we are to do this heavy lifting. As we age, we get more fully locked into who we are and what we believe. We’ve spent a lot of years building our beliefs and so we’re reluctant to stray from them.

Of course, like all things human, this tendency is not a given nor universally applied. Some older people are naturally more skeptical, and some are more inflexible in their beliefs. Not surprisingly, Lyons found those that leaned right in their political affiliations tend to be more belief-bound.

But, as I discovered this past Thursday, these information filtering tendencies are dependent on our moods and cognitive capacity. I am a naturally skeptical person and like to think I’m usually pretty picky about my information sources. But this is true only when I’m on my game. The minute my brain down-shifted, I began accepting dubious information at face value simply because I happened to agree with it. I didn’t bother checking to make sure it was true.

It sounded true, and that was all that mattered.

Happy 25th Birthday, Wikipedia!

Wikipedia is perhaps the last remaining vestige of the Internet we thought we’d build, two and a half decades ago. It was born of the same stuff that fueled open-source software and freeware, open access to knowledge and a democratization of data. This was part of the Internet that was supposed to make the world a fairer and more knowledgeable place, narrowing the gap between the haves and have nots. It was an “information superhighway” that would connect the global village and, according to the McGraw-Hill Computer Desktop Encyclopedia of 2001, “help all citizens regardless of their income level.”

We know better now. But despite the Internet’s hard pivot towards capitalism, Wikipedia is still around. It just celebrated its 25th birthday a few weeks ago. According to Wikipedia itself, there are 18 edits to its content every second from Wikipedians from all over the world. There are versions in over 300 different languages, and all of this receives 10,000 page views every second. There are over 7 million articles in the English version, and 500 new articles are added per day. In the last 25 years, almost 12 million users have edited the English Wikipedia at least once.

This was not what Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger envisioned in 2001, when they started Wikipedia. It was just supposed to be a collaborative sandbox that would allow for editing and drafting of articles which would then be included in their other project, Nupedia. Nupedia was more centrally controlled and structured. This side project used the wiki platform developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994. Wiki is Hawaiian for “quick” and Cunningham thought it had a little more panache than just calling his platform something like “Quickweb.”

The concept behind wikis is all about creating and empowering collaborative communities, opening the platform up to anyone who wanted to contribute. Wales and Sanger believed this would be a perfect way to quickly draft new entries at scale, but they still envisioned themselves and a team of editors as the gatekeepers who would control what would show up in Nupedia. But the pace of contribution soon outstripped the ability of Nupedia’s editorial team to keep up. The decision was made completely open the doors to contribution and make Wikipedia the end destination.

This completely open concept was a preview of what was to come. It may have been the one of the first times we saw what would become a common theme: a web-based platform unleashing the potential of a latent market by connecting an open community of suppliers (in this case, editors and contributors) and an audience of consumers at scale. It would be repeated by Uber, AirBnB and others.

The difference with Wikipedia was that – in this case – no one was making any money. The information was free. As a comparison, the competitor, the online version of Encyclopedia Brittanica, charged a yearly subscription of $50.

This upset of the information market didn’t go down well with everyone. This was especially true for academics and researchers. Students were warned not to use Wikipedia as a source. It was roundly criticized for its open nature and lack of peer review. To this day, much of the academic community still looks down its nose at Wikipedia, even though at least one academic study has shown that Wikipedia’s accuracy is on a par with the Encyclopedia Britannica and far outstrips it terms of the number of entries and the sheer breadth of content. This ongoing hostility towards Wikipedia is unfortunate, because the very same audience that sneers at it could be its most valuable contributors, especially in their own areas of expertise.

Of course, part of this lingering resentment could come in part due to the glacially-slow resistance to change from academic publishers, many of whom are still clinging to exorbitant subscription models. These publishers are resisting to the bitter end writer and iconoclast Stewart Brand’s feeling that “information wants to be free.”

Despite all this, Wikipedia has not only survived but thrived. It is still very much a part of the online information ecosystem, 25 years after its birth. And yes, it might be an anachronistic and naïve throwback to a more idealistic time, but it has proven at least one maxim of the open-source community. Eric. S. Raymond, in his seminal and prescient essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, called this maxim Linus’s Law, named after Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel. The law states, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”  

Or, to paraphrase, “Given enough eyeballs, most Wikipedia entries are mostly accurate.”

What Authoritarianism Gets Wrong

Like the rest of the world, my attention and intentions got hijacked over the weekend by what is happening in Minneapolis. I did not intend to write this post, but I feel I must.

What is happening right now is – plain and simple – authoritarianism. Some – like Jonathon Rausch in the Atlantic –  have used the word Fascism. Whatever label you put on it, it has the same flawed logic behind it – the belief that might makes right. It’s the same calculus of cruelty and coercion that the school yard bully uses: I’m bigger than you so do what I want you to do.

Here’s the problem with that formula. Resolve, resistance and resiliency aren’t things that can be consistently quantified. They are not static. The bewildering thing about humans when we’re faced with a crisis is this: the harder you push, the harder we’ll push back.

This is the reality of the red line. We accept adversity only up to a certain point. Past that point, individual concerns give way to that of the greater good. We join together into a coalition, dismantling the smaller walls that used to separate us to unite and fight a greater enemy that threatens us all. Rather than being beaten down by adversity, it raises us up.

We have always done this. Journalist Sebastian Junger documents one example in his excellent book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. During the London Blitz, Hitler believed he could bomb Londoners into submission. For 56 days he tried, dropping over 12,000 tonnes of bombs on the city, sure that it would break the will of Londoners. On one day alone, in September 1940, over 700 tones of high explosives and 86,000 incendiaries fell, killing 1,436 people. But the resolve of Londoners never wavered. In fact, it grew with adversity. They kept calm and carried on.

I’ve seen it firsthand in my own community. Our city, Kelowna, B.C., has been threatened with wildfires a number of times. In 2003, our city of 150,000 lost over 200 homes in one night and one third of the city was evacuated.

I have never seen this city come together like it did then. Neighbours helped neighbours. Those of us who weren’t evacuated opened our homes to those that were. In many cases, spare bedrooms and pull-out couches were occupied by total strangers. Crisis centers were swamped with offers of food, clothing, blankets and volunteer assistance.

This is how we’re wired. We band together in times of trouble. We are tribal creatures. As Junger found in his research, psychological health actually seems to improve in times of crisis. He cites a 1961 paper by American sociologist Charles Fritz, which opens with this sentence, “Who do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?” Junger writes, “Fritz’s theory was that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a ‘community of sufferers’ that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others.”

Humans evolved to join together to overcome obstacles. Our modern world doesn’t often ask that of us. But right now, in Minneapolis, that’s exactly what’s happening as thousands of ordinary people are coordinating protection patrols to document authoritarianism. They are using the encrypted Signal platform to communicate and direct observers to emerging trouble areas. They have established their own protocols of behaviour. It is, in the words of Robert F. Worth, again writing in the Atlantic, “a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest.”

At least two Minnesotans have paid as much as they mortally can, with their own lives.

This is the wrench that humans throw into the crushing cogs of authoritarian behaviour: the more you crack down on us, the stronger we will become as we join together to push back against you.

Of all the places on Earth, Americans should know this.  I can think of one more example of this that is particularly relevant. It happened 250 years ago, when American colonists joined together to protest against the authority of the British Crown.

We shouldn’t forget that.

Living with Chronic Disappointment

I was reading recently that 70% of American ex-pats that move to their dream destinations move back to the US within 5 years. Their fantasy of a sun-drenched, easier life in places like southern Portugal, Spain or Italy didn’t quite come true when their expectations run into reality. The Algarve villa, Costa del Sol hacienda or Sicilian villaggio that seemed so wonderful when you went there for a three-week vacation constitutes a different ball of wax entirely when you pick up your stakes and attempt to embed them again in foreign soil. There is a reason why everything seems so laid back in these Mediterranean destinations – it’s because it’s really hard to get anything done there- especially if you’re a foreigner carrying the extra baggage of North American entitlement.

Our unfulfilled expectations are becoming more and more of a problem. We incorrectly tend to over-forecast the positives and under forecast the negatives when we think about the future. And things seem to be trending towards more of this in the future.

I have always tried to live by the Kellogg’s Variety Pack Philosophy – everything in life is a mix – some things are great, some things you just have to put up with. Remember those trays of little individual sized cereal boxes? We used to get them when we went camping. For every little box of Frosted Flakes or Froot Loops, there would be a box of Pep or Bran Flakes. But we (and by we – I mean my 10-year-old self) cannot live on Froot Loops alone. Someone needs to eat the Pep. The sooner we learn that, the less disappointing life becomes.

This philosophy applies to most things in life – the people on your cruise, the cousins you’re going to run into at your family reunion, the things you do in your job, the experiences you’re going to have on your next vacation – even how happy you will be today. Not everything can be wonderful. But not everything will be horrible either.

There’s nothing new about this, but for some reason, our expectations seem to be set at an impossibly high level for more and more things lately. All we want is a life full of Froot Loops – or sunsets on the Costa Del Sol sipping sangria, and when the world can’t possible deliver what we expect, we end up living with chronic disappointment.

Now, obviously we’re not all that fragile that we’ll collapse is a sobbing heap if it rains on our birthday or we’re 8th in line at the grocery store checkout. We are made of sterner stuff than that. But I’ve also seen a noticeable trend towards less tolerance.  

For example, how often do you hear the word “toxic” now? Toxic used to be exclusively applied to things that were – well – toxic: industrial waste, hazardous chemicals, weapons of mass destruction. I think we can all agree that those things are 100% bad. But in the last ten years, toxic started being applied to the general stuff of our lives – people, jobs, behaviors, experiences and situations. And when we give things the label “toxic” we write those things off as a whole. We cease trying to look for the positive in any of it. Our patience with the real world runs out.

As it turns out, even disappointment is not an entirely bad thing. It does serve an evolutionary purpose. Part of our brain’s ability to learn and adapt is due to something called Reward Prediction Error – which measures the difference between expected and actual rewards. Using dopamine as the driver, the brain gets a pleasant jolt with unexpected rewards, a neutral response for expected rewards and if we end up with less than we expected, the dopamine factory shuts down and we get mopey. Suddenly, everything takes on a negative tinge.

This mechanism works well when disappointment is just part of our adaptive landscape, a temporary signal that tells us to steer towards something that offers a better chance of reward. But in a world where all our media is telling us to expect something better, bigger and more exciting, because that seems to be what everyone else is enjoying, real life will never live up to our expectations. We are doomed to be chronically disappointed.

When that happens, our brains start to rewire the dopamine circuits, trying to protect itself by recalibrating away from anticipation, moving from hope to pessimism. We settle for dopamine-neutral responses, trying to avoid the dopamine lows. We expect the bad and stop looking for the good. Our world seems filled with toxicity.

Here’s the problem with that. When we enter that state of mind, we prejudge a lot of the world as being toxic. Remember, the biggest dopamine jolt comes with unexpected rewards. It we look at the whole world with cynical eyes, we shut ourselves down to those surprise positive experiences that get the dopamine flowing again.

And that might be the biggest disappointment of all, because the joy of life is almost never planned. It just happens.

Singing in Unison

It’s the year-end so it’s time to reflect and also to look forward, carrying what we’ve learned in the past into an uncertain future.

Let me share one thing I’ve learned; we have to get serious about how we create community. And by community, I will use a very specific definition. In fact, perhaps it would be more accurate to replace “community” with “choir.”

Let me explain my thought with a story.

In the late1980’s, Harvard professor Bob Putnam was in Italy doing research. He was studying Italy’s regional decentralization of power which began in 1970. For a political scientist like Putnam, this was an opportunity that didn’t come often. Italy had passed power down to its 20 regional governments and had also established a single framework for administration and governance. This framework was the constant. The variables were the people, the societal environment and the nature of the regions themselves. If anyone is familiar with Italy, you know that there are vast differences between these regions, especially from the north to the south.

For Bob Putnam, he looked at how effective each administrative government was – was democracy working in the region? Even though the administrators were all referring to the same playbook, the results were all over the map – literally. Generally speaking, governance in Northern and Central Italy was much more effective than in the South.

For Putnam, the next big question was – why? What was it about some regions that made democracy work better than in others. He looked for correlations in the reams of data he had collected. Was it education? Wealth? Occupational breakdowns? In examining each factor, he found some correlation, but they all came short of the perfect positive relationship he was looking for.

Finally, he took a break from the analysis and drove into the country with his wife, Rosemary.  Stopping in one town, he heard music coming from a small church, so the two stepped inside. There, a volunteer choir was singing.  It may sound cliché, but in that moment, Bob Putnam had an epiphany. Perhaps the answer lay in people coming together, engaging in civic activities and creating what is called “social capital” by working together as a group.

Maybe democracy works best in places where people actually want to sing together.

Bob Putnam relooked at the numbers and, sure enough, there was almost a perfect correlation. The regions that had the most clubs, civic groups, social organizations and – yes – choral societies also had the highest degree of democratic effectiveness. This set Putnam on a path that would lead to the publishing of this work in 1993 under the title of Making Democracy Work along with his subsequent 2000 best seller, Bowling Alone. (If you’d like to know more about Bob Putnam, check out the excellent Netflix documentary, Join or Die).

Putnam showed it’s better to belong – but that only explains part of the appeal of a choir. There has to be something special about singing together.

Singing as a group is one of those cultural universals; people do it everywhere in the world. And we’ve been doing it for ever, since before we started recording our history. Modern science has now started to discover why. Singing as a group causes the brain to release oxytocin – christened the “moral” molecule by neuro-economist Paul J. Zak – by the bucketload. Zak explains the impact of this chemical, “When oxytocin is raised, people are more generous, they’re more compassionate and, in particular, they’re empathetic – they connect better to people emotionally.”

The results of an oxytocin high are the creation of the building blocks of trust and social capital. People who sing together treat each other better. Our brains start something tuning into other brains through something called neural synchrony. We connect with other people in a profoundly and beautifully irrational way that burrows down through our consciousness to a deeply primal level.

But there is also something else going on here that, while not unique to singing together, finds a perfect home in your typical community choir.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim found that groups that do the same thing at the same time experience something called “collective effervescence.” This is the feeling of being “carried away” and being part of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. You find it in religious ceremonies, football stadiums, rock concerts and – yes – you’ll find it in choirs.

So, if singing together is so wonderful, why are we doing it less and less? When was the last time you sang – really sang, not just moved your lips – with others? For myself, it’s beyond the limits of my own memory. Maybe it was when I was still a kid. And I suspect the reason I haven’t sang out loud since is because someone, somewhere along the line, told me I can’t sing.

But that’s not the point. Singing shouldn’t be competitive. It should be spiritual. We shouldn’t judge ourselves against singers we see on media. This never used to be the case.  It’s just one more example of how we can never be good enough – at anything – if we use media for our mirror.

So, in 2026, I’m going to try singing more. Care to join me?

The Long-Term Fallout from MAGA: One Canadian’s Perspective

The other day, an American friend asked how Canada was currently feeling about Trump and the whole MAGA thing. You may remember some months back a number of broadsides towards Canada from the president that seemingly came from nowhere -– Trump threatening/cajoling us to become the 51st state, on again-off again tariffs, continued assertions that the US does not need Canada for anything, completely unveiled threats towards us from Pete Hoekstra, the American Ambassador to Canada.

We took it personally. “Elbows up” became the Canadian rallying cry – a reference to protecting yourself in our beloved national sport – fighting along the boards balanced on frozen water while wearing sharp blades on your feet. Liquor stores had shelf after empty shelf that once were laden with California reds and Kentucky bourbon. Canadian trips to Disneyland and Las Vegas plummeted. Grocery stores started labeling products that (supposedly – which is another story) came from Canada. Canadian consumers and businesses scrambled to find Canadian substitutes for traditional American suppliers.

That was then. What about now?

Trump and the MAGA train have moved on to an endless list of other scandals and dumpster fires. I haven’t heard a whisper of the 51st state for a long time. While our trade war continues on, fueled by shots across the bow from both sides, I think it’s fair to say that we are now just lumped with every other country reeling from the daily bat-shit crazy barrage coming from Washington. Canadians are used to being ignored, for good or bad, so we’re back to situation normal – all F*$%ed up.

But have Canadians moved on? Have we dropped said elbows? The honest answer is – it’s complicated.

Predictably the patriotic fervor we had early this year has cooled off. California reds are back on the shelves. More Canadians are planning to visit Hawaii and Florida this winter. “Grown in the U.S.A.” stickers are back where they belong, in the produce bins at our grocery stores. When it comes to our American habit – it’s like the line from Brokeback Mountain – “We wish we knew how to quit you.”

Like all relationships, the one between the US and Canada is complex. It’s unrealistic to expect a heavily intertwined relationship like ours to disappear overnight. There are probably no two countries in the world more involved with each other’s business than we are. And that cuts both ways, despite what Mr. Trump says. We have been married to each other for a very long time. Even if we want to go through with it, a divorce is going to take some time.

The numbers from the first six months of our “Buy Canadian” campaign are in, and they are less than inspiring. According to StatsCan, 70% of Canadian businesses saw no increase in sales at all. Even with those that did, the impact was minimal and any gain was usually offset by other sales challenges.  

But if you dig a little deeper, there are signs that there might be more long-term damage done here than first meets the eye. In Canadian grocery stores over the past six months, sales of “Made in Canada” products are up 10% while U.S. made goods are down 9%. Those aren’t huge swings, but they have been sustained over 6 months, and in the words of one Canadian analyst speaking on CBC Radio, when something lasts for 6 months, “you’re moving from fad territory to trend territory.”

The dilemma facing Canadians is something called the “Attitude Behavior Gap” – the difference between what we want to do and what we are actually doing. Canadians – 85% of us anyway – want to buy Canadian rather than American, but it’s really hard to do that. Canadian goods are harder to find and typically cost more. It’s the reality of having a trading partner that outnumbers you both in market size and output by a factor of 10 to 1. If we want to have a Ceasar salad in December, we’re going to have to buy lettuce grown in the U.S.

But we are talking relationships here, so let’s relook at that 85% intention to “Buy Canadian” number again. That means that – 6 months after we were insulted – we still feel that a fundamental trust was irrevocably broken. We’re being pragmatic about it, but our intention is clear, we’re looking for alternatives to our past default behavior – buying American. When those alternatives make economic and behavioral sense to us, we’ll find other partners. That is what is happening in Canada right now.

Should Americans care? I believe so. Because I’m sure we’re not the only ones. The world is currently reeling from the sharp American pivot away from being a globally trusted partner. The short-term reality is that we will put up with it for now and pander to the Presidential powers that be, because we have to.

But we’re looking for options. Our dance card is suddenly wide open.

The Cost of Not Being Curious

The world is having a pandemic-proportioned wave of Ostrichitis.

Now, maybe you haven’t heard of Ostrichitis. But I’m willing to bet you’re showing at least some of the symptoms:

  • Avoiding newscasts, especially those that feature objective and unbiased reporting
  • Quickly scrolling past any online news items in your feed that look like they may be uncomfortable to read
  • Dismissing out of hand information coming from unfamiliar sources

These are the signs of Ostrichitis – or the Ostrich Effect – and I have all of them. This is actually a psychological effect, more pointedly called willful ignorance, which I wrote about a few years ago. And from where I’m observing the world, we all seem to have it to one extent or another.

I don’t think this avoidance of information comes as a shock to anyone. The world is a crappy place right now. And we all seem to have gained comfort from adopting the folk wisdom that “no news is good news.” Processing bad news is hard work, and we just don’t have the cognitive resources to crunch through endless cycles of catastrophic news. If the bad news affirms our existing beliefs, it makes us even madder than what we were. If it runs counter to our beliefs, it forces us to spin up our sensemaking mechanisms and reframe our view of reality. Either way, there are way more fun things to do.

A recent study from the University of Chicago attempted to pinpoint when children started avoid bad news. The research team found that while young children don’t tend to put boundaries around their curiosity, as they age they start avoiding information that challenges their beliefs or their own well-being. The threshold seems to be about 6 years old. Before that, children are actively seeking information of all kinds (as any parent barraged by never ending “Whys” can tell you). After that, chidren start strategizing the types of information they pay attention to.

Now, like everything about humans, curiosity tends to be an individual thing. Some of us are highly curious and some of us avoid seeking new information religiously. But even if we are a curious sort, we may pick and choose what we’re curious about. We may find “safe zones” where we let our curiosity out to play. If things look too menacing, we may protect ourselves by curbing our curiosity.

The unfortunate part of this is that curiosity, in all its forms, is almost always a good thing for humans (even if it can prove fatal to cats).

The more curious we are, the better tied we are to reality. The lens we use to parse the world is something called a sense-making loop. I’ve often referred to this in the past. It’s a processing loop that compares what we experience with what we believe, referred to as our “frame”. For the curious, this frame is often updated to match what we experience. For the incurious, the frame is held on to stubbornly, often by ignoring new information or bending information to conform to their beliefs. A curious brain is a brain primed to grow and adapt. An incurious brain is one that is stagnant and inflexible. That’s why the father of modern-day psychology, William James, called curiosity “the impulse towards better cognition.”

When we think about the world we want, curiosity is a key factor in defining it. Curiosity keeps us moving forward. The lack of curiosity locks us in place or even pushes us backwards, causing the world to regress to a more savage and brutal place. Writers of dystopian fiction knew this. That’s why authors including H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury and George Orwell all made a lack of curiosity a key part of their bleak future worlds. Our current lack of curiosity is driving our world in the same dangerous direction.

For all these reasons, it’s essential that we stay curious, even if it’s becoming increasingly uncomfortable.