Short Takes #9: Resist the Darkness Daily
Living In The Ultraprocessed World | Should Companies Take Stands? | Nothing But Distractions
Hope is a virtue to be practiced, not an aspiration to be managed. [...] To hope is to do good without expectation that we can make it so. It is to resist the darkness daily, whatever may come.
| David DeSteno, For 2026, There’s a Better Way to Be Hopeful
…
The New Year is a good time to reflect on hope.
Hope is a muscle, not a mood.
| Stowe Boyd
Living In The Ultraprocessed World
Angela Duckworth makes accessible her research in Willpower Doesn’t Work. This Does.1 The trick, she says, is to create scaffolding -- situational agency -- so you don’t need willpower. In this ultraprocessed world, where everything fractures our attention and focus, one thing — maybe the only thing — you can choose is your immediate surroundings: what you carry with you, how you prepare, where you place your phone when studying.
You cannot change the conditions of modern life, but you are the sovereign of what enters your personal space. Physical distance creates psychological distance: Draw close what you want more of; push away what you want less.
Should Companies Take Stands?
America Pulls Back From Values That Once Defined It, WSJ-NORC Poll Fi… -- Patriotism, religious faith, having children and other priorities that helped define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans, a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll finds.
| Aaron Zitner (from 2023 so we can't blame Trump 2.0)
It only gets worse:
The share of Americans who say that having children, involvement in their community and hard work are very important values has also fallen. Tolerance for others, deemed very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has fallen to 58% since then.
And with regard to businesses taking political (or controversial?) stands publicly?
Overall, 63% of people in the survey said that companies shouldn’t take public stands on social and political issues, while 36% of people said companies should take such stands. Among Republicans, 80% opposed companies doing so, while 56% of Democrats favored the idea.
Money is the only thing Dems and Reps agree about. As Derek Thompson wrote about these results, 'What binds the modern world is our collective reverence for money'.
That explains a lot.
Nothing But Distractions
A 2025 report from Microsoft found that workers experience some 275 distractions each day, or an interruption about every two minutes during the 9 to 5 workday. The average desk worker sits in meetings for nearly 15 hours a week in 2024, according to a survey from AI-powered calendar app Reclaim.ai.
How can anyone get anything done? The title of Hoover’s article is a clue: Sundays are the new Mondays2, which is mostly about people working on Sundays to get ahead of Mondays.
Related Notes
In that 2028 issue of workfutures.io, I presented Carl Erik Fisher citing of modern research, which suggests willpower is a myth [emphasis mine]:
More fundamentally, the common, monolithic definition of willpower distracts us from finer-grained dimensions of self-control and runs the danger of magnifying harmful myths — like the idea that willpower is finite and exhaustible. To borrow a phrase from the philosopher Ned Block, willpower is a mongrel concept, one that connotes a wide and often inconsistent range of cognitive functions. The closer we look, the more it appears to unravel. It’s time to get rid of it altogether.
