Musings at the COVID New Year

As we approach the COVID-quieted New Year, my wife and I sit and chat, mostly about the quotidian: what to do tonight or that we have a new granddoggie. We wryly smile that excitement is a trip to the supermarket.

But in the silences and amid my pre-New-Year's walks, the following thoughts have entered my mind. I share them in hopes they might inform some of your New Year's thinking, feeling, and conversation.

When is it Worth Pursuing the Dream Career, Relationship, Home, and Vacation?

If life feels mundane, it’s understandable that we dream, grasping for something to make life more exciting: the dream job, the dream relationship, the dream home, the dream vacation. 

We may be especially likely to aspire to a dream amid the grayness that the COVID restrictions or disease have foisted on us.

But as a career and personal coach who has worked with more than 6,000 clients over the past 35 years, I’ve seen too many people chase a dream only to not achieve it even partially and perhaps worse, kill themselves to achieve the dream and still feel empty.

In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I make the best case I can for and against chasing the aforementioned common dreams.

Marty Nemko Plays Auld Lang Syne on the Piano

Here's a YouTube I just recorded of me playing Auld Lang Syne on the piano.

 

Musings on Our 44th Anniversary: Lessons from a relationship not made in heaven but made to work here on earth

Today is Barbara and my 44th anniversary and we discussed what has made our marriage work. It’s not a marriage made in heaven but my PsychologyToday.com article today shares how we've made it work here on earth. Perhaps it might help your relationship.

Aging Well: Tips for a better old age

Our final years are rarely golden but fellow Psychology Today blogger Meg Selig’s new book, Silver Sparks, offers practical advice on how to pan for silver. My PsychologyToday.com article today offers some of its nuggets and my amplifications and other thought on each.

Succeeding While Assertive: 3 tips for navigating that attribute, which can threaten other people

Conventional wisdom urges us to be assertive. But a number of my clients have found assertiveness to be a mixed bag. My Psychology Today article today offers three tips for navigating that attribute, which can threaten other people.

Succeeding While Shy: Nuggets for the introvert or socially anxious

The just-published new edition of the classic career guide, What Color is Your Parachute, updated by Katharine Brooks, includes a fine section on succeeding while shy. And she speaks from personal experience: “I myself have been painfully shy for much of my life, but no one ever guesses.”

My PsychologyToday.com article today offers nuggets from that section plus my additions.

Is Meditating the Best Use of That Time?

 My PsychologyToday.com article today explores the question of whether meditation is the best use of that time.

Making it Easier to Do Healthy Things: Mask-wearing, weight control, exercise, sleep, etc.

Most people know what they should do to maintain or improve their health. But there’s a Grand Canyon of difference between knowing and doing, especially doing it consistently. Perhaps one or more of the ideas that have helped some of my clients (and me) might help. That's my PsychologyToday.com article today.

11 Low-Risk, High-Payoff Actions: Ideas for improving your relationships, work, and happiness

My PsychologyToday.com article today offers distilled versions of ideas that my clients have found particularly useful.

5 Trends That the Career-Minded Should Consider in 2021

As a career counselor, part of my job is to anticipate trends and the implications for people at work and for those who are looking for work. My PsychologyToday.com article today describes five such trends.

Five Musts in the Excellent Manager or Leader

Today, a client said she was nervous about getting promoted to her first position managing people. While we dealt with her psychological issues, she said she found the practical advice most helpful. So I thought I’d share that with you. They boiled down to five keys. I describe them in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

A Tormented Liberal and a Tormented Conservative Job Seeker

My career counseling practice isn’t immune from today’s political polarization. While many of my clients are politically moderate or apolitical, I have clients on both political poles, and they tend to be angst-filled.

My PsychologyToday.com article today offers composite letters from a tormented liberal and from a tormented conservative, followed by my responses

Words or Phrases to Use Less Often

Yesterday, I posted 10 words and phrases that convey intelligence and nuance.   Today's Psychology Today article suggests some words and phrases that you might want to use less. Not a bad New Year’s resolution.

10 Words or Phrases to Use More in the New Year: Words that convey intelligence and nuance

How-to books and even, ahem, blog posts, may not sufficiently engender behavior change.

My clients generally find that the more concise the advice, the more likely they are to follow it. Well, the ultimate in brevity of course, is the word or phrase. My PsychologyToday.com article today suggests ten words or phrases that you might want to more often use in in 2021. Of course, there’s no need to wait until the New Year. Feel free to start now.

Reviewing the Photos of Your Life: Clues to what you should be doing now

Your old photos can be useful prompts for thinking about your life. I offer suggestions in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Walking the Earth Feeling Insecure: A letter and my response

My clients and friends say they often feel insecure, a feeling that usually affects both professional and personal life. My PsychologyToday.com article today offers a composite letter encapsulates their experiences and is followed by my response.

Should You Be More of a Thinker or a Doer?: A thinker and a doer exchange letters

A perhaps under-discussed human continuum is thinker vs. doer. My PsychologyToday.com article today offers two composite letters. One is from a thinker to a doer, the other from a doer to a thinker.

Perhaps reading them will help you clarify if you are where you want to be on that continuum.

The Other Mask We Wear: Hiding what’s really going on with us

Today, when we say “mask” we think “COVID.” But we wear another mask: the pleasant or flat facial expression that masks the negatives we're experiencing: fears, anxieties, anger, substance abuse, that our home, our life is in disarray. We also may don a facial mask to portray positive characteristics: sophistication, intelligence, virtue.  My PsychologyToday.com article today offers thoughts on the wisdom of keeping the mask up and when it's worth the risk of dropping it

A Christmas Sermon: Is peace always the answer?

If there’s one word that’s core to Christmas, “It’s peace.” Yet we need recognize that even the seemingly unarguable exhortation to strive for peace must not be treated as absolute law. There are exceptions. In my Psychology Today article today. I offer examples where peace might be unwise.

The Commencement Talk I'd Give Now: Career roads less traveled

If I were to give a commencement talk to a December 2020 graduating class, this is what I'd say.

Decades ago, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck urged us to consider “the road less traveled.” this commencement address offers five under-considered career roads less-traveled as you enter the quite different world of 2021 and beyond. It's my PsychologyToday.com contribution today.

3 Keys to Parenting a Teenager Well

It's never been easy to parent teens: They want to establish their autonomy, which can lead to arguments.

But parenting may be tougher than ever. It's often asserted that the next generation will be the first to do less well than the previous. For example, most Gen Zers will not be able to afford to buy a home, that linchpin of the American dream. Layer on top of that a job market impeded by automation, offshoring, and now the COVID economic collapse, and it's easy to understand why teenagers are so stressed.

My Psychology Today article today offers three keys to good parenting that should help, even in these tough times.

The World’s Shortest Course on Emotional Intelligence

Professional and personal success usually requires both cognitive and emotional intelligence, the ability to say and do things that get others to like you or do you what you'd like.

Too often, emotional intelligence is seen as an ineffability that's suffused through lucky people’s DNA. Or emotional intelligence is the subject of a long course.

My Psychology Today article today attempts to distill emotional intelligence's essence into a blog-length post.

Career Advice to Gen Z

A reader wrote me:  ”It seems like most young people will fail at the game of life. . . .Will you please write an article about this?”

While every generation faces new challenges, it does seem that Gen Z (people in their teens or early 20s) will have a harder time finding well-paying, stable work, let alone making enough money to afford that traditional core of the American dream: owning a home. Automation, offshoring, COVID, and increasing government-mandated costs to employers, portend a challenge for most job searchers. It is for that typical person that I write my Psychology Today article today.

An Audacious Wish List for 2021

 

Dear Santa,

Forgive the graphic term, but 2020 pretty much sucked.

 

I’m not just talking about COVID with its shutdowns, lockdowns, and snotty masks — and that assumes you didn’t have to go on a ventilator.

 

 We also had a presidential campaign that should embarrass anyone—Were those two the best that America had to offer?

 

Then there was the racial roiling: If you are a liberal, you called it “unrest,” “protests” or “activism.”  If you aren’t liberal, you called it, “rioting,” “looting” and “burning down cities.” 

 

Plus, if you lived in the “land of dreams,” California, following years of drought and water restrictions, 2020 treated you to wildfires that turned even a health nut into a chain smoker.

 

Oh for a better 2021. Regression to the mean promises that, but Santa, I want to be much greedier:

 

 I want a vaccine that doesn’t knock people out for a day, which understandably makes them hesitate to come out for Round 2. Better still Santa, give me a one-dose vaccine, like the Johnson & Johnson one that’s in Phase III trials. Oh, and I want my vaccine to have no side effects, and oh, one that confers lifetime immunity.

 

And Santa, the zillions spent on a COVID vaccine should offer lessons for creating a vaccine against other scourges. Could you thus give our COVID nightmare the dreamy side effect of birthing a vaccine for AIDS, even cancer?

 

 And while I’m thinking ginormous:

 

Santa, I want an economy that comes back enough to restore jobs but one that isn't so robust that it encourages the over-materialistic lifestyle that cheapens people’s existence. Too many people focus on the Wise Men’s gift of gold, far fewer people on the frankincense and myrrh.

 

Santa, my next wish is very personal to me. I waste so much time every year keeping tax records and preparing my income tax returns. We need a tax system that replaces all that, not to mention the tax-avoidance shenanigans — Cayman Islands? What we need is a value-added tax. Santa, in case you're not up on taxation systems, a VAT is pretty much like a sales tax paid by consumers and manufacturers so it adds up to the same amount that the income tax yields. No tax return, no cheating, well, less cheating.

 

Santa, we also really need an election system that doesn’t require candidates to double-talk and press tawdry flesh for four years. No surprise, that deters the best people from running. Instead, elections should be just two weeks long, publicly funded, with a true debate — no biased moderators — and if one candidate rudely dominates (a particular presidential candidate rushes to mind), it’s there for all to see. The campaign would also include candidates’ voting record and platforms compiled by, say, Consumer Reports. 

 

And while we’re reinventing systems, education is ripe for that. The EduBlob — district, county, regional, state, and federal bureaucracies — each mandate a Manhattan phonebook of rules and regulations, some of which contradict each other. That means that a fortune in our tax dollars and educator efforts are wrested from where it matters — the classroom.

 

Speaking of the classroom, at the high school level at least, classroom lessons should be presented online by the world’s most transformative instructors, so that all students, from Harlem to Hollywood, can get the best. A live teacher would be in the classroom to answer questions, lead discussions and interactive activities, explain homework, and keep kids from dancing on their desk. I never danced on my desk but I think of how much time I spent chained to my school desk bored or befuddled. Santa, please save the next generation from that!

 

Dear reader, you may make fun of me, calling my wish list no more realistic than is Santa Claus, but seriously, we all need to dream, to aspire, to believe in something more hopeful than what we’ve experienced in 2020. Here’s to a Santa-Claus 2021.

I read this aloud on YouTube.