#social comparison

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: I'm an ENFP, I'm 30 years old and I’m really needing to work on my self-confidence for me and for dealing with people. I’ve read in our blogs some posts that reinforce the importance of developing skills to have confidence. I think it's very legitimate.

In this process of learning new things, I often find myself in great difficulty and my inner child agonizes with insecurity. I look at friends who have confidence in themselves as something natural: confidence that they will learn, confidence in themselves, but unfortunately I am very unstructured (poor growth environment, without incentives), so I have a lot of difficulty trusting myself: especially being so inexperienced, clumsy and slow to learn everything.

What gets worse is being in environments where people don't have patience with beginners. Like now I'm living in a foreign country where people are very rude in the workplace. This hurts me a lot, because I have problems asserting myself and being respected. I discovered that they need rudeness to respect others. How to deal with this? Would I be able to impose myself without getting nervous and acting rude (as they usually have to do)?

And more, how can we learn from this situation? How can I be truly confident and also how can I simply demonstrate more confidence to make myself respected? I'm tired of conveying weakness. People don't value my sweetness it's not a good tool for me right now. How to develop self-confidence, at least start to demonstrate a little confidence and boundaries! And in the midst of this, the most important thing: how do you deal with such unpleasant people? Especially me being used to being such a sweet, "silly" person, always with my guard down, calm and considered weak by others.

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You seem to be talking about two issues that need unpacking separately: 1) personality, and 2) confidence.

You're having a personality clash with the people at work. Analytical psychology posits that personality clashes are disturbing because they remind you of negative things in yourself you dislike, so there is a need to go within to see what's really happening.

To be clear, I'm not denying that toxic people/environments exist. I believe your description and I would certainly dislike the workplace myself. The point I'm making is, when you have no choice but to be in that sort of environment, there are healthier ways to navigate it, but being judgmental about people is not a healthy way. Judgmentalness is a sign of projection, which is an unhealthy defense mechanism, see previous posts on the topic.

One basic thing type theory teaches us is there are different people in this world. Therefore, one must always begin with acceptance of differences, if one hopes to have healthy relationships in every realm of life. You've come to identify with the so-called "sweet" aspects of your personality. When you identify with one side of yourself, you tend to unconsciously valorize that side, otherwise, you might end up hating yourself. However, in the process of valorizing that side, you inadvertently end up denying, devaluing, dismissing, or denigrating its opposite. It's no accident that these "rude" people trigger you. They bring to light your unconscious self-rejections.

Workplace = professionalism. To succeed in any workplace, it's important to set a clear boundary between private and public. It isn't appropriate to use the workplace to hash out personal issues. E.g. It's not a place to play games about who you favor or dislike. It's not a place to seek validation to soothe your insecurities. I would even argue it's not a great place to seek friendship or companionship. When you bring the personal into the professional, you are more likely to create mess, drama, discord, and conflict. Of course, there are people who live for messiness. Ask yourself exactly what role you want work to play in your life and behave in accordance with those values/principles in every workplace.

When you describe yourself in mostly positive terms ("sweet") and describe other people in very negative terms like "rude", "impatient", or "unpleasant", there is a possibility that you are biased. Typism is a bias. It means you believe some personalities/traits to be superior or inferior to others. ENFPs typically hope to get along well with all sorts of people. If you hope for that, you need to eliminate typist thinking. This requires learning to always approach people in a neutral/professional manner, even when you dislike them at first. You don't know the full story behind people. Oftentimes, the majority of people in toxic environments are just like you, i.e., struggling to survive and doing whatever it takes to keep out of trouble.

When you approach people in a neutral/professional manner, you should adopt an objective perspective about them. Yes, you see their faults, but you shouldn't lose sight of their redeeming qualities. When you're being judgmental, you're likely to dismiss people whole-hog, unable to see their redeeming qualities. Being blind to the positive means you lose opportunities for improving the situation, which means losing hope, which means losing self-confidence as you feel more and more passive and helpless.

How about, instead of using the word "rude", call them "direct" or "candid"? Instead of "impatient", how about "efficient"? When you use more neutral language to characterize people, you reinforce the idea that every personality trait has its pros and cons. When you can finally visualize the upside, you can harness it to your advantage. This allows you to let go of negative feelings and focus on the work itself. Nobody is asking you to marry these people. All you have to do is work with them long enough to get stuff done. Keep your feelings to yourself and stick only to the facts. Once work is done, go home, put it out of your mind, and get on with the rest of your life. If there are things you need to learn to improve your performance in the workplace, spend time on self-improvement outside of work in order to speed up your progress.

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With regard to confidence, when people bring up "lack of confidence", they often conflate several different concepts including: self-confidence, self-efficacy, self-esteem, and self-worth. It can be a complicated topic, so I'll elaborate on it for future reference. Some non-native English speakers have mentioned to me that their native tongue doesn't have direct translations for these four concepts, so beware that language might be a barrier for understanding them.

These four terms are relatively new in English as well; it wasn't until recently that they've started to filter down from academia into mainstream vocabulary. We know that these four concepts are distinct because, in the course of examining people who fall broadly under the category of "confidence issues", psychologists discovered that different people had somewhat different underlying processes happening, e.g., you could be good with one but struggle with the others. Of course, over time, how people use these terms in everyday language gets fuzzy, as the meaning diverges from the original academic definitions. I'll explain my understanding of them. You specifically mention learning issues, so I'll also connect to that.

I. SELF-CONFIDENCE arises from the degree to which you feel in control. If you 1) have good self-control, 2) feel as though you mostly have control over the direction of your life, and 3) feel as though you have enough control over your environment, then you're likely to feel self-confident. Thus, reflect on whether you feel some deficits in any of the above. There are things you can do to get a firmer sense of control.

Self-control is sometimes related to discipline, which means the ability to delay immediate gratification for a more important future goal. If you tend to be spontaneous, impulsive, or rebellious, then it's easy for you to lose sight of the bigger picture and it's hard for you to follow good learning procedures, which can easily derail your learning process. Some ways to improve your self-control over time:

improve your big-picture thinking so that you don't forget about your ultimate goal (through Ne)

learn the value of following good methods/procedures for achieving a goal (stop resisting Si)

structure your environment more intentionally to eliminate distractions/temptations and reward progress (tap into Te)

Having enough control over the direction of your life often relates to your ability to make good decisions. If you tend to be very emotional, indecisive, or easily overwhelmed by too much information, then it indicates you don't have a good system for processing the information required to inform your decisions. One way to improve your information processing ability is to improve your critical thinking skills. Critical thinking involves parsing information correctly, understanding its meaning, and systematizing information, in service of determining the best course of action (see past posts and recommended books). When learning, not being able to organize information and create feasible plans means slow progress.

Feeling a sense of control over the environment is often related to problem-solving skills. What happens when you meet a problem or challenge? Anxiety? Panic? Anger? Spiraling out of control? To have good problem-solving skills involves: deducing cause and effect, analyzing situations objectively, drawing valid conclusions, and generating good ideas and action-plans. Problem-solving is an important part of the critical thinking skills mentioned above. The process of learning is never completely smooth. You are bound to meet challenges and obstacles, so how do you address them? Self-confident people don't tend to focus on how they feel about problems, rather, they mostly focus on the problem itself and try to solve it as quickly as possible. When the problem is gone, the negative feelings go away.

II. SELF-EFFICACY arises from the degree to which you have faith in yourself, specifically your abilities. Efficacy means being able to bring forth an intended result (effectively) or reach an intended goal (efficiently). When you meet a problem/challenge, do you believe you have enough knowledge and skill to overcome it? If so, you have good self-efficacy. If not, do you believe, with enough dedicated learning and improvement, you can overcome it eventually? That is also good self-efficacy. In essence, it means you believe in yourself, with regard to possessing the resources or being able to obtain the resources necessary to succeed in reaching your goals.

Self-efficacy is sometimes related to competency and mastery. Being young and inexperienced, it's normal to have lower self-efficacy than someone older and wiser. In the learning process, it's important to have compassion for yourself and evaluate your progress fairly. Is the level of competency/mastery you expect from yourself proportional to the reality of your situation? If you haven't had many learning opportunities, through no fault of your own, then you shouldn't feel ashamed for being a bit "behind". This is NOT a personal flaw/failing that deserves punishment.

Note that "ahead" or "behind" are relative terms, meaning they can be understood from different perspectives, so are you using the right perspective? For example, are you evaluating yourself through your own eyes, through the eyes of your rivals, or through the eyes of an expert on the subject matter? Use fair and reasonable benchmarks/standards to measure where you are and where you should be. One reason people of any age suffer self-doubt is because they are too honest about what they don't know or can't do, to the point where they become dismissive of what they do know and can do. It's very important to be objective and balanced when assessing what you lack by also fully recognizing what you already possess or have achieved so far.

In my humble opinion, I believe people already possess everything they need to have good self-efficacy. Human beings evolved to be adaptable and that is largely how they have succeeded as a species. You have the capacity to learn and adapt to your environment. Get back in touch with it, have faith in it, and harness it as necessary. Instead of thinking there's only ONE WAY things should/must go, be more flexible and open to alternatives (use Ne).

III. SELF-ESTEEM refers to how you generally feel about yourself. This is usually related to the kinds of beliefs you have about yourself and the part they play in constructing your self-concept. The beliefs you have about yourself (e.g. about who you are and what you are capable of) are heavily influenced by your past experiences.

One of the most common signs of low self-esteem is negative self-talk. Observe the kinds of things you say to yourself in your head. Is it mostly negative, neutral, or positive? If it's mostly negative, how are you meant to feel good about yourself? People with low self-esteem say very nasty things to themselves that they would never dream of saying to others. Why the double standard? As a "sweet" person, you have empathy for others, so be sure to extend the same empathy to yourself.

An example related to learning: I've unfortunately known too many students to abandon a subject simply because one of their (jerkass) teachers told them they would never be good at it. The negative experience led them to form the belief that "they weren't meant to study it" and couldn't succeed even if they tried. Every time they encountered the subject, the belief would rise up and they'd talk themselves out of trying. Of course, watching themselves fall further and further behind through repeated failures made them feel worse and worse about themselves. Self-esteem can be damaged in a vicious cycle: By believing the worst of yourself, you aren't properly motivated to learn and improve, and then you meet failure after failure, which then confirms your negative beliefs about yourself.

One good way to tackle low self-esteem is cognitive-behavioral therapy. A cognitive-behavioral therapist is trained to bring to light your underlying beliefs (and how they interact with your feelings and behaviors). By bringing unrealistic beliefs into consciousness, you open up space to change them or adjust them to be better aligned with reality. Perhaps you need to reflect on the beliefs you have about yourself, regarding who you are/aren't, who you're supposed/not supposed to be, what you hope/don't hope to be, what you are/aren't capable of, etc. Are your beliefs attuned to your current reality? Negative past experiences don't have to dictate your future, but they will if you're unaware of how they still influence you today.

IV. SELF-WORTH refers to feeling "good enough", specifically whether you believe you are worthy of acceptance and love. When you're young, your sense of self-worth arises in large part from how you were regularly treated by the people around you. If you grew up in an environment where love was conditional, then your self-worth likely became tied to those conditions. For example, if your parents only show you love when you get As in school, it's likely that your self-worth will become tied to your academic performance and future professional success.

Self-worth can also be damaged in a vicious cycle. If you believe you aren't worthy of love, then you signal to others that it's okay to treat you poorly, which reinforces the idea that you aren't worthy. One common way people defend against low self-worth is to make themselves into something "better" or more "worthy" to their social environment, or to obtain something they can offer in exchange for social validation of their worth (e.g. wealth or status). This striving can lead to problems with overachieving, perfectionism, anxiety, depression, self-blame, or self-harm.

One common way to tell if you suffer self-worth issues is if you are often engaged in social comparison that leads you to envy people you deem somehow "superior" to you and/or feel shame about being "inferior" to them. If that's the case, it's likely that you need to correct some faulty thinking patterns:

Don't make illogical comparisons, such as comparing your first step against someone else's thousandth step. These kinds of illogical comparisons exacerbate feelings of unworthiness. You're inflicting pain upon yourself by thinking this way.

Don't be superficial and judge people only by their cover. Remember, you don't really know what someone went through to get where they are today. Perhaps if you knew the full story, their situation wouldn't seem very enviable at all. Maybe you want to play golf as well as Tiger Woods, but would you also want to give up your childhood and constantly suffer harsh treatment as he did?

Don't expect that every person should be the same, know the same things, have the same abilities, live the same life, etc. Respect individuality, which means allow for differences between yourself and others. Understand that everyone has their own path in life rather than believing everyone should conform to the same crude standard (i.e. avoid Te loop).

Do you desperately need everyone to like you or think you're great? Wanting the approval of toxic people is basically granting them power over you. Don't hurt yourself by trying to become something you're not just because someone triggered your insecurity. Insecurity is your problem, not their problem. It is the insecurity itself you need to face up to by reflecting on where it really comes from and what it says about your ability to accept and love yourself as you are (this is related to problems with Fi development in ENFPs).

What many people with low self-worth don't understand is that self-worth starts from within; it doesn't come from the people out there. When you're able to accept and love yourself and stand proud in who you are (without all those "conditions" that were imposed upon you earlier in life), you'll then be capable of teaching others to respect you. With healthy pride in yourself, it's far easier to be assertive, set boundaries, and advocate for your needs. Why? Because you firmly believe you matter, you have a right to the space you inhabit, you have a right to be yourself, and you deserve to be treated as an equal. It's also easier to ignore, dismiss, or eject toxic people when you finally realize that you don't need or want anything from them.

All four of these concepts relate to how you perceive and evaluate yourself, but from different angles. You mention feeling insecure, but which of the above gets closer to the root of the issue? It's important to be more precise about identifying the problem if you hope to come up with the right solution.

[indizombie]

Beyond social media’s “addictive” nature, a significant number of respondents across genders and continents reported feeling that social media’s promotion of social comparison and the amplification of harmful content had a negative impact on their mental health. Young people reported feeling “anxious” and “self-conscious” about “unrealistic [body] images” viewed in their feeds and told us of their “over-sexualizing” of their body “at a young age” in response.

‘“We are totally exposed”: Young people share concerns about social media’s impact on privacy and mental health in global survey‘, Amnesty International

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

💭Cognitive Dissonance and Social Comparison🧠

🔍 Explore How Social Comparison Creates Cognitive Dissonance on Medium How do social comparisons affect your everyday thoughts and emotions? 🔥🌈 It isn’t always bad. Yet, Social Comparison Creates Cognitive Dissonance and can be detrimental. In 1954, Psychologist Leon Festinger, developed his Theory of Social Comparison. Cognitive Dissonance —AI image generated with Canva 🤔 Explore the concept…

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jonathan Haidt

Published: Mar 24, 2024

Those born after 1995, argues Jonathan Haidt in his new book, were the first people in history to go through puberty with a portal to an alternative universe in their pockets – and the toll this has taken on their wellbeing has been devastating

Suppose that when your first child turned nine, a visionary billionaire whom you’d never met chose her to join the first permanent human settlement on Mars. Unbeknown to you, she had signed herself up for the mission because she loves outer space, and, besides, all of her friends have signed up. She begs you to let her go.

You hear her desire, so before saying no, you agree at least to learn more. You learn that the reason they’re recruiting children is because they will better adapt to the unusual conditions of Mars than adults. If children go through puberty and its associated growth spurt on Mars, their bodies will be permanently tailored to it, unlike settlers who come over as adults.

You find other reasons for fear. First, there’s the radiation, against which Mars does not have a protective shield. And then there’s the low‐gravity environment, which would put children at high risk of developing deformities in their skeletons, hearts, eyes, and brains. Did the planners take this vulnerability of children into account? As far as you can tell, no.

So, would you let her go? Of course not. You realise this is a completely insane idea – sending children to Mars, perhaps never to return to Earth. The project leaders do not seem to know anything about child development and do not seem to care about children’s safety. Worse still: the company did not require proof of parental permission.

No company could ever take our children away and endanger them without our consent, or they would face massive liabilities. Right?

At the turn of the millennium, technology companies created a set of world-changing products that transformed life not just for adults all over the world but for children, too. Young people had been watching television since the 1950s but the new tech was far more portable, personalised and engaging than anything that came before. Yet the companies that developed them had done little or no research on the mental health effects. When faced with growing evidence that their products were harming young people, they mostly engaged in denial, obfuscation, and public relations campaigns. Companies that strive to maximise “engagement” by using psychological tricks to keep young people clicking were the worst offenders. They hooked children during vulnerable developmental stages, while their brains were rapidly rewiring in response to incoming stimulation. This included social media companies, which inflicted their greatest damage on girls, and video game companies and pornography sites, which sank their hooks deepest into boys. By designing a slew of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socialising, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.

What legal limits have we imposed on these tech companies so far? Virtually none, apart from the requirement for children under 13 to get parental consent before they can sign a contract with a company. But the law in most countries didn’t require age verification; so long as a child checked a box to assert that she was old enough (or put in the right fake birthday), she could go almost anywhere on the internet – and sign into any social media app – without her parents’ knowledge or consent. (The law is being tightened in the UK, due to the 2023 Online Safety Act, and is under review in the US.)

Thus, the generation born after 1995 – gen Z – became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive and unstable. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness to managing what became their online brand, posting carefully curated photographs and videos of their lives. This was now necessary to gain acceptance from peers, the oxygen of adolescence, and to avoid online shaming, the nightmare of adolescence. Gen Z teenagers got sucked into spending many hours of each day scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances and distant influencers. They watched increasing quantities of user-generated videos and streamed entertainment, fed to them by algorithms that were designed to keep them online as long as possible. They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in social behaviour that is essential for successful human development.

The members of gen Z are, therefore, the test subjects for a radical new way of growing up, far from the real‐world interactions of small communities in which humans evolved. Call it the Great Rewiring of Childhood. It’s as if they became the first generation to grow up on Mars. And it has turned them into the Anxious Generation.

There was little sign of an impending mental illness crisis among adolescents in the 2000s. Then, quite suddenly, in the early 2010s, things changed. In just five years between 2010 and 2015, across the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and beyond, the number of young people with anxiety, depression and even suicidal tendencies started to rise sharply. Among US teenagers, those who reported experiencing a long period of feeling “sad, empty, or depressed” or a long period in which they “lost interest and became bored with most of the things they usually enjoy” – classic symptoms of depression – surged by roughly 150%. In other words, mental illness became roughly two and a half times more prevalent. The increases were similar for both sexes and happened across all races and social classes. And among a variety of mental health diagnoses, anxiety rates rose the most.

More recent data for 2020 was collected partly before and partly after the Covid shutdowns, and by then one out of every four American teen girls had experienced a major depressive episode in the previous year. Things got worse in 2021, but the majority of the rise was in place before the pandemic.

I addressed some of these issues in The Coddling of the American Mind, a book [about modern identity politics and hypersensitivity on university campuses] I wrote in 2017 with free speech campaigner Greg Lukianoff. The day after we published, an essay appeared in the New York Times with the headline: “The Big Myth About Teenage Anxiety.” In it, a psychiatrist raised several important objections to what he saw as a rising moral panic around teenagers and smartphones. He pointed out that most of the studies showing a rise in mental illness were based on “self‐reports”, which does not necessarily mean that there is a change in underlying rates of mental illness. Perhaps young people just became more willing to self‐diagnose or talk honestly about their symptoms? Or perhaps they started to mistake mild symptoms of anxiety for a mental disorder?

Was the psychiatrist right to be sceptical? He was certainly right that we need to look at multiple indicators to know if mental illness really is increasing. A good way to do that is to look at changes in figures not self‐reported by teens. For example, the number of adolescents brought in for emergency psychiatric care, or admitted to hospitals each year because they deliberately harmed themselves, either in a suicide attempt, or in what is called non‐suicidal self-injury, such as cutting oneself without the intent to die.

The rate of self‐harm for young adolescent girls nearly tripled from 2010 to 2020. The rate for older girls (ages 15–19) doubled, while the rate for women over 24 actually went down during that time. So whatever happened in the early 2010s, it hit preteen and young teen girls harder than any other group. Similarly, the suicide rate for young adolescents increased by 167% from 2010 to 2021.

The rapid increases in rates of self‐harm and suicide, in conjunction with the self‐report studies showing increases in anxiety and depression, offers a strong rebuttal to those who were sceptical about the existence of a mental health crisis. I am not saying that none of the increase in anxiety and depression is due to a greater willingness to report these conditions (which is a good thing) or that some adolescents began pathologising normal anxiety and discomfort (which is not a good thing). But the pairing of self‐reported suffering with behavioural changes tells us that something big changed in the lives of adolescents in the early 2010s.Quick Guide

The arrival of the smartphone in 2007 changed life for everyone. Of course, teenagers had mobile phones since the late 1990s, but they were basic flip phones with no internet access, mostly useful for communicating directly with friends and family, one‐on‐one. Some adolescents had internet access via a home computer or laptop but it wasn’t till they got smartphones that they could be online all the time, even when away from home. According to a survey conducted by the US non-profit group Common Sense Media, by 2016, 79% of teens owned a smartphone, as did 28% of children between the ages of eight and 12.

As teenagers got smartphones, they began spending more time in the virtual world. A Common Sense report, in 2015, found that teens with a social media account reported spending about two hours a day on social media and around seven hours a day of leisure time online. Another 2015 report, by the Washington thinktank Pew Research, reveals that one out of every four teens said that they were online “almost constantly”. By 2022, that number had nearly doubled, to 46%. These “almost constantly” numbers are startling, and may be the key to explaining the sudden collapse of adolescent mental health. These extraordinarily high rates suggest that even when members of gen Z are not on their devices and appear to be doing something in the real world, such as sitting in class, eating a meal, or talking to you, a substantial portion of their attention is monitoring or worrying (being anxious) about events in the social metaverse. As the MIT professor Sherry Turkle wrote in 2015 about life with smartphones: “We are forever elsewhere.”

Faced with so many virtual activities, social media platforms and video streaming channels, many adolescents (and adults) lost the ability to be fully present with the people around them, which changed social life for everyone, even for the small minority that did not use these platforms. Social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity, and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast, for adolescents, over the course of just five years.

When I present these findings in public, someone often objects by saying something like: “Of course young people are depressed – just look at the state of the world in the 21st century. It began with the 9/11 attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the global financial crisis. They’re growing up with global warming, school shootings in the US and elsewhere, political polarisation, inequality, and ever-rising student loan debt. Not to mention wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.”

But while I agree that the 21st century is off to a bad start, the timing does not support the argument that gen Z is anxious and depressed because of rising national or global threats. Even if we were to accept the premise that the events from 9/11 through to the global financial crisis had substantial effects on adolescent mental health, they would have most heavily affected the millennial generation (born between 1981 and 1995), who found their world shattered and their prospects for upward mobility reduced. But this did not happen; their rates of mental illness did not worsen during their teenage years. Also, had the financial crisis and other economic concerns been major contributors, adolescent mental health would have plummeted in 2009, the darkest year of the financial crisis, and it would have improved throughout the 2010s as the unemployment rate fell, the stock market rose, and the global economy heated up.

There is just no way to pin the surge of adolescent anxiety and depression on any economic event or trend that I can find.

When Covid arrived in 2020, the disease and the lockdowns made sociogenic illness more likely among people of any age. Covid was a global threat and a stressor. The lockdowns led teens to spend even more time on social media, especially TikTok, which was relatively new. But the steep rise in anxiety and depression among adolescents was in place well before the pandemic.

People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.

Parents I talk to about smartphones, social media and video games tell stories of “constant conflict”. They try to lay down rules and enforce limits, but there are so many arguments about why a rule needs to be relaxed, and so many ways around the rules, that family life all over the world has come to be dominated by disagreements about technology. Maintaining family rituals such as mealtimes can feel like resisting an ever-rising tide.

A mother I spoke with in Boston told me about the efforts she and her husband had made to keep their 14- year-old daughter, Emily, away from Instagram. They could see the damaging effect it was having on her. To curb her access, they tried various ways to monitor and limit the app on her phone. However, life became a permanent struggle in which Emily eventually found ways around the restrictions. In one episode, she got into her mother’s phone, disabled the monitoring software, and threatened to kill herself if her parents reinstalled it. Her mother told me:

“It feels like the only way to remove social media and the smartphone from her life is to move to a deserted island. She attended summer camp for six weeks each summer where no phones were permitted – no electronics at all. When we picked her up from camp she was her normal self. But as soon as she started using her phone again it was back to the same agitation and glumness.”

Platforms such as Instagram – where users post content about themselves, then wait for the judgments and comments of others, and the social comparison that goes with it – have larger and more harmful effects on girls and young women than on boys and young men. The more time a girl spends on social media, the more likely she is to be depressed or anxious. Girls who say that they spend five or more hours each weekday on social media are three times as likely to be depressed as those who report no social media time. The difference is far less marked with boys. Girls spend more time on social media, and the platforms they are on – particularly Instagram and Snapchat – are the worst for mental health. A 2017 study in the UK asked teenage girls to rate the effects of the most popular social media platforms on different parts of their wellbeing, including anxiety, loneliness, body image, and sleep. Teenagers rated Instagram as the worst of the big five apps, followed by Snapchat. YouTube was the only platform that received a positive overall score.

The 2021 song Jealousy, Jealousy by Olivia Rodrigo sums up what it’s like for many girls to scroll through social media today. The song begins: “I kinda wanna throw my phone across the room/ ’Cause all I see are girls too good to be true.” Rodrigo then says that “co-comparison” with the perfect bodies and paper-white teeth of girls she doesn’t know is slowly killing her.

Psychologists have long studied social comparison and its pervasive effects. The American social psychologist Mark Leary says it’s as if we all have a “sociometer” in our brains – a gauge that runs from nought to 100, telling us where we stand in the local prestige rankings. When the needle drops, it triggers an alarm – anxiety – that motivates us to change our behaviour and get the needle back up. So what happened when most girls in a school got Instagram and Snapchat accounts and started posting carefully edited highlight reels of their lives and using filters and editing apps to improve their virtual beauty and online brand? Many girls’ sociometers plunged, because most were now below what appeared to them to be the average. All around the developed world, an anxiety alarm went off in girls’ minds, at approximately the same time.

A 13-year-old girl on Reddit explained how seeing other girls on social media made her feel, using similar words to Olivia Rodrigo:

i cant stop comparing myself. it came to a point where i wanna kill myself cause u dont want to look like this and no matter what i try im still ugly/feel ugly. i constantly cry about this. it probably started when i was 10, im now 13. back when i was 10 i found a girl on tiktok and basically became obsessed with her. she was literally perfect and i remember being unimaginably envious of her. throughout my pre-teen years, i became “obsessed” with other pretty girls.

Instagram’s owner, Facebook (now Meta), itself commissioned a study on how Instagram was affecting teens in the US and the UK. The findings were never released, but whistleblower Frances Haugen smuggled out screenshots of internal documents and shared them with reporters at the Wall Street Journal. The researchers found that Instagram is particularly bad for girls: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression… This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

If we confine ourselves to examining data about depression, anxiety, and self-harm, we’d conclude that the Great Rewiring has been harder on girls than on boys. But there’s plenty of evidence that boys are suffering too.

A key factor was boys taking up online multiplayer video games in the late 2000s and smartphones in the early 2010s, both of which pulled them decisively away from face-to-face or shoulder-to-shoulder interaction. At that point, I think we see signs of a “mass psychological breakdown”. Or, at least, a mass psychological change. Once boys had multiple internet-connected devices, many of them got lost in cyberspace, which made them more fragile, fearful, and risk averse on Earth. Beginning the early 2010s, boys across the western world began showing concerning declines in their mental health. By 2015, a staggering number of them said that they had no close friends, that they were lonely, and that there was no meaning or direction to their lives.

The overwhelming feeling I get from the families of both boys and girls is that they are trapped and powerless in the face of the biggest mental health crisis in history for their children. What should they – what should we – do?

When I say that we need to delay the age at which children get smartphones and social media accounts, the most common response is: “I agree with you, but it’s too late.” It has become so ordinary for 11-year-olds to walk around staring at their phones, swiping through bottomless feeds, that many people cannot imagine that we could change it if we wanted to. “That ship has sailed,” they tell me.

Yet we are not helpless. It often feels that way because smartphones, social media, market forces, and social influence combine to pull us into a trap that social scientists call a collective action problem. Children starting secondary school are trapped in a collective action problem when they arrive for their first day and see that some of their classmates have smartphones and are connecting on Instagram and Snapchat, even during class time. That puts pressure on them to get a smartphone and social media as well.

It’s painful for parents to hear their children say: “Everyone else has a smartphone. If you don’t get me one, I’ll be excluded from everything.” Many parents therefore give in and buy their child a smartphone at age 11, or younger. As more parents relent, pressure grows on the remaining kids and parents, until the community reaches a stable but unfortunate equilibrium: Everyone really does have a smartphone.

How do we escape from these traps? Collective action problems require collective responses: parents can support one another by sticking together. There are four main types of collective response, and each can help us to bring about major change:

1. No smartphones before year 10 Parents should delay children’s entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones with limited apps and no internet browser before the age of 14.

2. No social media before 16Let children get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to an avalanche of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers.

3. Phone-free schoolsSchools must insist that students store their phones, smartwatches, and any other devices in phone lockers during the school day, as per the new non-statutory guidance issued by the UK government. That is the only way to free up their attention for one another and for their teachers.

4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independenceThat’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

These four reforms are not hard to implement – if many of us do them at the same time. They cost almost nothing. They will work even if we never get help from our legislators or from the tech giants, which continue to resist pressure to protect young users’ safety and wellbeing. If most of the parents and schools in a community were to enact all four, I believe they would see substantial improvements in adolescent mental health within two years. Given that AI and spatial computing (such as Apple’s new Vision Pro goggles) are about to make the virtual world far more immersive and addictive, I think we’d better start today.

This is an edited extract from The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.

[truonguyennha]

WEEK 8: AUGMENTED REALITY FILTERS

As this week’s topic is "augmented reality filters," this post will focus on discussing the reasons why people use AR filters. Although people use filters because of filters' benefits, they also need to keep in mind that filters also have their disadvantages, and these disadvantages are also discussed in the post. However, it is necessary to understand the definition of AR beauty filters before analyzing the pros and cons of them. Regarding Isakowitsch (2023), AR beauty filters can be understood as automated tools for editing photos using AI and computer vision in order to detect the features of a face and modify them. Hence, in general, people use AR beauty filters to edit photos. Nevertheless, editing photos is not the only reason why people use AR beauty filters. People choose to use AR beauty filters because of these benefits:

BENEFITS

The first benefit of filters, according to Baker (2020, p. 208), is that filters can be used as alternatives for makeup. People can apply “appearance” and “makeup” filters to reinstate their makeup look as well as polish their appearance after a long day (Baker, 2020, p. 208) (Figure 1). The second advantage of filters is that they offer users more power and control over their own image and appearance when they can change their appearance themselves without relying on cosmetic surgery (Coy-Dibley, 2016, p. 6). For instance, filters can change people’s face shape, adjust their skin, raise their cheekbones, and so forth (Isakowitsch, 2023).

Figure 1: Filter reinstates people's polish appearance

DRAWBACKS

Despite offering many advantages, filters also have disadvantages, and these disadvantages negatively impact society. One of the greatest disadvantages of filters to society is that they create a “stereotypical form of beauty” (Baker, 2020, p. 209). Filters create a “stereotypical form of beauty” because most of the filters are created with a function, which is to “thin out the face, slim and shorten the nose, enlarge the eyes, plump the lips, and smooth the skin” (Baker, 2020, p. 209). Furthermore, this “stereotypical form of beauty” is created due to the limitations of the apps themselves, when the apps create filters that only illustrate some of certain types of aesthetics, which the aesthetics follow current trends (Coy-Dibley, 2016, p. 5). As a result, “stereotypical form of beauty” can lead to fears, dysmorphic disorders, and body dissatisfaction among people in society. The first reason is that social comparison is individuals’ desire because they want to know more about themselves (Crusius et al., 2022). More specifically, individuals have a desire to evaluate themselves objectively through comparing themselves with others; additionally, individuals compare themselves with media images as well (Grogan, 2008, p. 118, as cited in Coy-Dibley, 2016, p. 5). Thus, when there are many “negative” dissimilarities, either between individuals and others or between individuals and media/ideal images, they will be dissatisfied with their current body image (Coy-Dibley, 2016, p. 3). Moreover, the second reason is that conforming to the ideal beauty standard of social media causes pressure on individuals, and individuals also have more anxiety and uncomfortable feelings about their current body image (Verrastro et al., 2020, p. 31), which lead to dysmorphic disorder and lower the quality of life of people in society.

In conclusion, AR filters offer both advantages and disadvantages for users and the society. On the one hand, filters provide convenient and creative tools for makeup application, self-expression, and altering one's appearance. On the other hand, the constant exposure to unrealistic beauty standards promoted by these filters can potentially leading to social comparison and body dysmorphia.

REFERENCES

Barker, J. (2020). Making-up on mobile: The pretty filters and ugly implications of Snapchat. Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, 7(2), 207–221. https://doi.org/10.1386/fspc_00015_1

Coy-Dibley, I. (2016). “Digitized Dysmorphia” of the female body: the re/disfigurement of the image. Palgrave Communications, 2(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.40

Crusius, J., Corcoran, K., & Mussweiler, T. (2022). Social Comparison: Theory, Research, and Applications. In D. Chadee (Ed.), Theories in Social Psychology. WIley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781394266616.ch7

Isakowitsch, C. (2023). How Augmented Reality Beauty Filters Can Affect Self-perception. Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, 239–250. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26438-2_19

Verrastro, V., Fontanesi, L., Liga, F., Cuzzocrea, F., & Gugliandolo, M. C. (2020). Fear the Instagram: beauty stereotypes, body image and Instagram use in a sample of male and female adolescents. Qwerty, 15(1), 31–49. https://doi.org/10.30557/qw000021

[morriganpostofficial]

The Dichotomy Of Being Rich And Sad: An Exploration

The pursuit of wealth and success is often seen as a pathway to happiness and fulfilment. However, there exists a dichotomy between being rich and being sad that challenges this notion. This dichotomy has been explored by many scholars, researchers, and individuals who have experienced the highs and lows of affluence. In this article, we will delve deeper into the complexities of this phenomenon…

[kittykatninja321]

Any au that has Jason willingly working for the government even if it’s as a social worker has automatically kinda lost me because we’re talking about someone who distrusts the system so much that as a child he chose the streets over going into custody of social services. Jason’s lack of faith in institutions continues into adulthood (but also through his original Robin tenure low key), one of the most substantial differences between his and Bruce’s philosophy is the fact that Bruce puts his faith in the law and the criminal justice system while Jason decidedly does not in the slightest

[zeldacharm]

(In case you've ever wondered what Link and Zelda smell like)

[nellasbookplanet]

The fandom god discussion is interesting, but I feel it’s sometimes hindered by an unwillingness to separate gods from mortal society, or even a sort of over-eagerness to project our own reality onto them, which simply doesn’t work. I've seen the gods referred to as rulers or tyrants demanding worship (which I kinda understand because it’s something Ludinus says in-game, though it’s funny to see fandom corners confidently repeat the inaccurate talking points of the antagonist) but more interestingly I've also seen them referred to as a higher/the highest social class, as colonizers imposing themselves on mortals, the raven queen specifically as new money. Overall these comparisons tend to talk about the gods and their actions regarding Aeor in the past and predathos/the Vanguard in the present less as if they're about saving their own lives and more as if they want to preserve their powerful position.

The gods, by their very nature, are above mortals. They cannot be compared to any mortal ruling class because they didn’t choose or strive for that power and cannot feasibly get rid of it/step down/redistribute it (nor do they actually in any sense rule; killing the raven queen, unlike killing an actual queen, will not end the 'tyranny' of death), they simply have it by virtue of being gods. Saying that’s unfair or unequal and that the gods should be killed because of it is akin to saying it’s unfair a mountain is bigger than you and demanding it be levelled, except the gods, unlike mountains, are living, feeling beings who shouldn’t have to die because some people can’t stand the idea of not always being top dog. Thing is, the gods themselves ultimately understood this power imballance and that they can't help but hurt Exandria the way humans can't help but step on bugs, and thus removed themselves from the equation by creating the divine gate. Saying this isn’t enough and that they're clinging to power is just demanding they line themselves up to be killed.

[mbti-notes]

1/2 Hello. INFJ in her 20s. My issue is I lack general knowledge. I’m trying to work on closing these gaps of knowledge that I’m supposed to have and which often prevent me from relating to other people + contributing to conversations. They have become a deep source of shame and exacerbate my social anxiety. I’ve always been detached and kept to myself and my own limited interests but have recently realized I desperately need to change.

[con't: However, I know I’ve lost a lot of time and feel restless to catch up. I’m very sensitive to perceived judgement and criticism in relation to the stuff I don’t know, so I have become particularly terrible at navigating social interactions. Can you give me some tips on coping with the fact that I’m behind everyone else? My confidence and motivation constantly waver because I keep getting bogged down by shame.]

Questions for Reflection: On what basis do you believe that people will only like you if you "know things"? Why do you believe that a person who doesn't have general knowledge is a "bad" person and should therefore feel ashamed of themselves? To feel ashamed is to believe that you have committed a moral wrong and deserve punishment, so is punishment what you believe you deserve? Is your idea of a fulfilling relationship one where people always compete to show off their knowledge? Do you realize that staking your self-worth on your intellect is a symptom of Ti loop?

Ignorance is just a simple fact of not knowing, and it is remedied through the simple act of learning. For example: read more, watch news and documentaries, take some classes, listen to lectures, speak to experts, etc. At no point is shame relevant to learning if you're learning purely for the sake of personal growth and edification.

Shame only enters the picture when you start comparing yourself to others and fear being judged as inferior (misuse of Fe). You say your issue is lack of general knowledge, but that is incorrect just based on your own words: "I keep getting bogged down by shame". When you misidentify the problem or don't prioritize problems in the correct order, you choose the wrong solutions, and you aren't likely to get the results you hoped for.

Whatever it is you want to improve about yourself, it should come from a place of love and wanting to live your life well, i.e., it should be something YOU genuinely need or want for yourself. But if the main/only reason you want to improve something is because you think it makes you more "worthy" in the eyes of OTHERS, then the real motivation is self-loathing. Trying to cover up self-loathing eventually backfires. This is why I often warn people about checking their intentions before they attempt function development.

It seems your ego development isn't far along enough to support function development. You haven't yet learned that "approval" does not equal "love". There are mean and judgmental people out there and you can't always avoid them. The strategy you've (unconsciously) adopted for dealing with them is "if you can't beat them, join them", i.e., to believe their judgments about you and change yourself into what they want, in hopes that they'll stop being mean and judgmental toward you.

Unfortunately, the price you pay for seeking approval is to always be vulnerable to disapproval. When you're a child, it is indeed a problem to constantly encounter mean and judgmental people because you aren't equipped to understand their behavior, so you take it too much to heart. However, when you reach adulthood, you have the capacity to reflect and make better sense of things. In terms of personal growth, it is counterproductive to keep making yourself into a victim of other people's judgments over and over again.

As an adult, the problem lies in your choices. You are the one continuing the old strategy of seeking approval. Thus, you have now become the one who is the most mean and judgmental of yourself. People's judgments will always trigger you as long as they amplify all the negative judgments you already have about yourself. You perceive feedback/criticism as a form of punishment because you believe you deserve punishment. You believe there is something "wrong" with you that needs to "change", "improve", or be "eliminated" in order for people to like you, so you punish yourself accordingly.

When you are primarily motivated by shame, your perception and judgment is heavily compromised by projection. Shame primes you to detect threats even when none exist, so you don't possess an accurate picture of others and how they see you. Shame is really a reflection of your own inner struggle to accept, like, and love yourself. It is this inner struggle that stops you from being fully present in social interactions and a full contributor in relationships. Your attention and focus is always too busy with fear of shame or thoughts about how to mitigate shame.

You always have a choice about how to respond to your emotions. Do you take responsibility for generating your emotions or blame others for causing them? Do you view emotions as your friend or as the enemy? When the emotion of shame gets triggered, your habit is to take it as objective confirmation of your subjective negative self-appraisals, and then replay the vicious cycle of trying to eliminate the shame via eliminating what you hate about yourself, only to fail and then hate yourself even more.

But you could, instead, listen to the shame compassionately, be curious about what it really means, and take it as a golden opportunity to deeply examine why you have such trouble accepting, liking, and loving yourself. After all, how would you show others what is likable/lovable about you when even you aren't able to see it, let alone express it? Healthy Fe should encourage emotional intelligence and empathy, not judgmentalness.

Shame is good and necessary for helping you be a moral person, to know when you've done something wrong and need to change or atone. But toxic shame means that your moral beliefs about right/wrong are heavily distorted, usually due to having internalized the faulty beliefs of people that used shame against you in the past, particularly during childhood. Toxic shame leads people to be excessively negative and harsh when appraising themselves, which produces problems with low self-esteem and low self-worth. Toxic shame is a major contributing factor to social anxiety.

Perhaps you should work with a therapist to discover and resolve the root of the shame (from your past). Learning to shame yourself during childhood might've served a useful purpose of obtaining approval and avoiding disapproval from authority figures who wielded control over your well-being. But now you're discovering that it doesn't really work because it keeps you in child mentality and even destroys your self-esteem, so is it still necessary to keep doing it as an adult? Are there better ways to establish good self-esteem? Adults have the power to ensure their own well-being.

In a normal and healthy relationship, what most people want is for someone to take an interest and share experiences with them. Whatever you don't know about their interests you could easily learn from them or from sources they provide. Therefore, all that is required of you is to express curiosity and empathy, two things you were born knowing how to do. Unfortunately, that knowledge has since been buried under the shame, so it's up to you to dig it back out.

[gayandlovableperidot]

reminder that autism is going to affect basically everyone differently and just because you're autistic doesn't mean you have a perfect understanding of everyone with autism. be respectful and listen.

[quetzalpapalotl]

But at the end of the day, as his older brother was the god that controlled mortal wealth, of course the Wind Master was generous and uncaring about petty details.

There's something about how Shi Qingxuan's early portrayal carries this sense that they're only so nice because they're spoiled sweet and have it easy thanks to their standing. Much like how Prince Xie Lian was said to be able to keep his heart in paradise because he had never experienced the abyss. But just like how Xie Lian (in the end) kept to his values even after all that suffering, Shi Qingxuan remained generous and uncaring of petty details even after losing everything and having nothing to their name, because being kind is a choice they make.

[hoetao]

sooo sort of a masterpost of info about Wriothesley.

about his character:

hes basically incorruptible, is said to be "low profile and dependable"

‌mostly just cares about the peace and tranquility of the inmates (he's a protector at heart!!)

treats everyone equally and generally prefers to be "reasonable" rather than use more forceful methods

‌doesn't really like cruelty and violence but if the need comes, he will use it

‌he thinks of himself as "neither a good person or a villain, just another soul still living on in this world"

‌hes basically just interested in every bit of knowledge any person shares and in their unique talents

he says that he himself doesn't have many abilities, but he "knows how to find people who do and get them to work for him"

his past:

‌wanted to be convicted and spilled everything about how he killed his adopted parents (cough cough child traffickers), even though some wanted to treat him with leniency

‌learned to lockpick and create small gadgets as a child

gained Coupons in the arena of the Fortress (while injuring himself considerably)

‌when he got his vision after going to prison he just. hid it between the fabric of his clothes so that no one would know and/or steal it. and then he kinda just hid it some more, for years, until he went to the Palais to receive his title.

‌how he actually became the Administrator:

accumulated a fuckton of Coupons

got everyone's respect by being so rich, "observant, persuasive, humble and reasonable"

got his account emptied in retribution by the former administrator

‌convinced other ppl to protest and challenged the previous administrator to a duel

the former administrator run away from the fight, leaving Wriothesley on the last day of his sentence without anyone to sign his exit papers

‌"so he walked into the office and took over all relevant duties"

about his role as a Fortress Administrator:

‌has a private information network and many connections

‌rejected having a ceremony for his title of the Duke. no spotlight for good old duke.

‌basically his management style just helps the Fortress make money (with one of its main clients being the Palais); he even jokes that his title was basically bought because he's a leading tax contributor

‌after dealing with the Fatui spies he went for a swim. near primordial water. and he didn't say shit after realizing that the prophecy may be coming to pass, he just started preparing his funky ship.

relationships with others:

‌Clorinde actually admits that no one really knows all of the methods he uses to keep the Fortress up and running; it is stated that "very few people know him in his entirety"

he seems to think of Neuvillette as some sort of a. higher power that cannot show concern (BUT HE DOES OH HE DOES)

‌he indeed held out the umbrella for Neuvillette in the rain. the Iudex was polite, but distressed.

‌gifts a lot of tea to Furina.

‌got Neuvillettes trust (i think what he implies is that he got it by his actions, not words?) and the Iudex "fought hard for the title and reputation he now has"

‌when he went to prison Neuvillette told Sigewinne to take care of him and they frequently exchanged letters about his progress (and Wriothesley called her Neuvillettes spy…)

info that i find especially funky:

he's a big softie when it comes to animals and kids

‌may or may not go outside the Fortress incognito to buy snacks sometimes. he's actually too incognito to know really

‌doesnt treat boxing like a hobby, "more like a necessity"

‌melusines put stickers on him and he rarely notices them do so. they are just too good. and besides, it doesn't bother him. they also have bets on who will pit more stickers on him.

‌he would like to have a happy childhood and maybe the ability to trust people (i am BAWLING)

‌might be "a bit taller than Neuvillette"

drinks coffee with milk and tea with two cubes of sugar

‌he thinks Sigewinnes milkshakes taste of desolation

Sigewinne spiked his tea with anaesthetics when he was younger because he always refused them out of fear that they would fog his brain

[lorebird]

In which Ford struggles so badly to relate to other people that he wonders if he’s really human at all. The more isolated he becomes, the harder it is to reconcile with his own humanity.

[sadaveniren]

Hi! The sisters are heading to la and they might get papped with B and F and spend there several weeks pretending to be one big happy family. How not to feel anxious about their circus? I know they are not my monkeys but still I feel uneasy when it comes to bg

Well. For starters last I checked we don’t know FOR SURE where they are going but yes. Clearly they are painting this story that they are going to the USA for that big family trip they’ve talked about.

As for how I don’t feel anxious? Simple. They’re telling us it’s happening. And in this fandom if we’re being told something private life about Harry or Louis is happening it means…. It’s not their private life. It’s FOR US.

Like. Louis has shown a lot of the last couple of years he can go and do stuff and not advertise it and no one knows he’s there. Just think back to all of the adventures we saw his band/crew go on with him over tour. We didn’t know those things were happening when they did. We found out eventually but no one was posting “hey what’s a good thing to do in Iceland?” Or “where can we go ride ATVs?”

I’ve talked before about analyzing sources when it comes to the boys (and other things) and one of the biggest things is what is trying to be sold.

We didn’t NEED to be told they were doing a family vacation. Phoebe doesn’t NEED to ask IG for tips on long haul flights with a 9 month old. She has an older sister with a baby of her own. We were told about the big family vacation and Phoebe ASKED IG because the stage is being prepped for “look at our big happy family” and “look at our big happy family” is inherently going to mean Freddie should be there. So. Either we get Freddie content (and maybe that means he won’t show up for Christmas, who knows) and in that case - oh look we were prepped for it! - or we don’t 🤷🏼‍♀️

Either way. This trip is meant to be seen. Whether you like the Tomlinson twins or not (gonna go out on a limb and assume more people in fandom DONT) they are influencers and they TELL STORIES with their social media to sell people shit. And part of what they are selling is this idea that they are being transparent about their private lives (plot twist they definitely aren’t)

So basically… I don’t get anxious cause this is just something being sold to us. If this was an actual private vacation we wouldn’t know about it. So if Freddie shows up - lol kay… you should be in school buddy cause the USA doesn’t have breaks like that - but it’s just…. It’s just the story.

[uncanny-tranny]

People who compare transition to self harm or use real people they know who've self-harmed as a metaphorical comparison to transitioning aren't making the gotcha they think they're making - they're just showing that they don't have the compassion or maturity to engage with either topic at even a conversational level.

And, frankly, it's infuriating as a person who does see those who self-harm as my equal who doesn't need to be used as a cudgel against another group of often vulnerable people.