Weekends... and Self Improvement.

Weekends are an interesting construction. Americans feel entitled to them and have likely lived with them long enough to take them for granted. The whole week is given an emotional structure based on what we're supposed to feel on the weekend. But, the weekend is a more recent construction than I had originally thought: with religious origins (of course, for days of worship) but more formally related to worker's unions.

According to Wikipedia (for some light research into the topic), the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America demanded and received a five day work week in 1929. Nationwide, the weekend wasn't fully integrated until 1940. Wikipedia says these claims need citation. According to Weekend America, even the word 'weekend' didn't exist until the 1870s. (Weekend America confirms Wikipedia's assertions) The weekend started at first to give workers time to attend worship services and spend time with their families. Sunday was easy to grant, given the large percentage of Christians; Saturdays were harder, given the lower percentage of Jews. As Weekend America points out, if the Jew's religious observance occurred on Wednesday, we would have had Wednesday off and there would be no two-day weekend.

The weekend was set up as a time for relaxation, to be spent with family and or at worship. With the weekend, we gained an emotional pattern for the whole week to follow: Sunday for rest and worship (Christians), Monday for getting back to the grind, Tuesday a continuation of Monday but without the meetings, Wednesday as "hump" day metaphorically coming over the rise to look downhill toward Thursday which is still part of the work week but with the end in sight, Friday to tie up loose ends at work and feel that sense of accomplishment for a week completed, and Saturday for goofing off. Tensions start low on the weekend, rise over the week, and fall again toward the weekend in a seemingly eternal cycle of ups and downs. I just want to remind folks that this cycle is of our own construction.

There is absolutely no reason to feel entitled to a weekend, or even for that matter to feel obligated to enjoy them. That isn't to say that we shouldn't enjoy our weekends, but we shouldn't enjoy them any more than any other day. Beyond our little social circle of life, the earth turns and shows a particular point to the sun on a fairly regular basis. The sun won't shine any brighter on a weekend than it does during the week. As far as business is concerned, the importance of the weekend is fading as workers begin to leave behind religious traditions of weekly worship. When I was young, even restaurants were closed on Sundays; now it is difficult for waitresses to schedule two days off in a row. Other types of business, with less open to the public front end operations, still close on weekends as long as it is convenient for them to do so. Those workers that make sure to take religious leave on days of worship are gladly supplanted by those who don't. And still the entitlement to a weekend persists.

The feeling of obligation to enjoy a weekend can be taxing in the same way that trying too hard to enjoy a vacation can be. There is potential for anxiety and guilt associated with doing "weekend things". If you don't do those "weekend things" during the weekend, you have to wait until next weekend. You may miss the opportunity to take advantage of nice weather by going outside to enjoy your activity of choice, especially if you planned something like a movie marathon or video game tournament. Your picnic plans may be ruined by bad weather. Any number of unexpected events may upset the plans you had for your special two days.

I personally am an example of what can happen when the sense of entitlement to free time and especially weekends goes too far. I go to school during the day, work hard while I'm there, and resent any intrusions into my freedom after school hours have ended. At work it is easy to work hard but, my chores have been piling up for months now because I feel a need to do things for myself that I am interested in doing. I feel that somehow, writing this blog will be more satisfying than having clean dishes. Reading trumps laundry. Guitar practice beats out dusting. I get by on the bare minimum of chores because I have designated all time outside of work and school as mine. Indeed, I have been encouraged to believe that through subtle and sometimes unsubtle appeals of media, friends, and my own pleasure seeking self. This is an extreme case, surely, but one that inevitably demonstrates that entitlement to free time and relaxation can become a very ugly scene.

There must be a way to escape this. I have to change my thinking about the week and weekends in order to change my feelings and behaviors. I have to remember that all days are no more than the turning of the earth. I have the weekend to use at my discretion because of a tradition started by workers unions little more than one hundred years ago. I have every moment to choose how I use my time, not just on the weekends, but all the time. I can choose to skip class for a bike ride. I can choose to use a cloudy day for chores. I can choose to impose a work schedule on myself that fills the gaps in my obligations to others with obligations to myself. Above all else, I can choose to enjoy my week. The weekend shall nevermore hold sway over me. That up and down cycle can become a passage of pleasant days. I enjoy good work, why not enjoy more of it? I can turn my life into a project, so that every moment I am thinking of how to improve myself and enjoy doing it. I can turn my energy to productive goals, and increase the level of standard upkeep along the way. I must make myself see that it will be a slow process. I have a lot of catching up to do, after all.

I hope that more than myself will be able to see what I am seeing now and hope to continue seeing in the future. Every day is a day to be treasured, to be enjoyed, to be experienced, and to be utilized for the betterment of the self. I had known this before, but thought it to suffice to expand my mind with my free time. That's silly. Time isn't free. It shouldn't matter what day of the week it is, or what we do during that day, as long as it is progressive. Work, play, studies, creative expression, all are experiences that can fill our time. It's time to stop taking our weekends for granted. Simply because traditions says we don't have to go to work, doesn't mean we shouldn't spend the time working.

Such a Sad, Soggy Science

     I'm very disappointed in my chosen field right now. I finally figured out why psychology is not only a soft science but is openly ridiculed by other fields and laymen alike. Some of the wishy-washy approximated studies present their findings as absolute fact... to the point of utter silliness. Psychologists use mathematical terms to describe non-mathematical relationships and then wonder why they get funny looks. The graphs are not graphs. The math is not math. The math that's supposed to describe the graph doesn't. Some of the terminology is mixed up into an approximation of meaning that the other sciences have pinned down -- dare I say it? -- to a science. 

     Up until this point, my profs and so-on have been pretty good at pointing out when a theory or line of research turned out to be utter bullshit. The higher I get in the curriculum, the harder it is to distinguish the diamonds from the rough... and instead of helping us poor students out with it; they just present the whole schmear as easily proven scientific fact. Well, I hate to break it to you high and mighty Nobel Laureate Ph.D.s, that's not how science works. When there's ambiguity, you must state the ambiguity. When there is no set pattern, just a suggestion of a trend, you must state that it requires further research to determine exact relationships... and an admission that those relationships may not be general, but specific to the test group. If I hadn't had any taste of harder science, if I was ignorant of the methods of psychological research, I might be duped into believing things that aren't even self-consistent. 

     For all you folks out there that aren't familiar with the science, I can use Sigmund Freud as a beautiful example of what I'm talking about. I'll state it clearly: Freud’s theories have been proven wrong. They are Incorrect. Outdated. The methods he used to collect data were flawed in very basic ways and his subjects were not normal in any sense of the word. As far as we can tell without better data from the times, his test group was not only far too small to be representative of the population, but restricted to 12 sexually repressed Victorian age nymphomaniacs. That is not to say that his theories were without merit, for some of the general concepts he provided are still very useful in the study of psychology today. It's just that the conclusions he drew from his research were invalid and over-reaching. Yet, despite knowing for I don't know how long that Freud was wrong, psychoanalytics persisted for about 60 years. 

     Research is a powerful force in the world. Without it we would not have any of the technologies leading up to the computers allowing me to post this blog. There is a pretty simple and generally agreed upon method for doing research that shows a causational relationship between two variables. Here's the scientific method if you needed a refresher. I like the little backward loop on that flow chart; it shows a part of research that happens behind the scenes that really makes it all worthwhile. See, people don't like to publish papers about scientists being kinda right and kinda wrong with no clear distinction. So, the way we fix it (and strengthen the scientific merit of the paper), is by looking at what we found in the data, picking out the interesting parts, and repeating the whole experiment just for that part. In that way, we can either thoroughly confirm a new concept, or totally throw it out. In psychology in particular, this is useful because sometimes the statistical analysis of an experiment can show flaws in our method that muddy the results. By repeating the process and elimination the inconsistencies of our method we can get better results. That's not to say that well done research can ever be perfect. We don't have the time or resources to do a complete study that undeniably proves anything, but we can get to a point where we are pretty sure. Of course, we need to state that we are only pretty sure and not completely sure. Often, research will create more questions than it answers. More questions mean job security for dedicated researchers (hint hint). The chart shown above is not the only qualifications for good research, but a part of the multitude of things that drives the research process. The specific experimental parameters are also very important. The project guide link I have is for a school sponsored science fair, but the general concepts are pretty good. Note that I don't say that they are exactly right, just pretty good.

     The saddest thing about all of this is that most of the silly stuff would be very easy to eliminate. All that needs to be done is for anyone teaching psychology to stick to solid research, hedge bets with disclaimers of inaccuracy, and generally stop claiming to know the absolute truth of anything. Oh, and use scientific terminology the same way the other sciences do. Seriously. You may not think it matters much, but if you can sling the lingo so everyone else understands it, you make yourself look smarter, not dumber. Make up your own words if you need to, but for things already decided, don't go fiddling around with it. Easy.

     I admit this is a bit more of a rant than a detailed description of what is wrong, so if you have any questions regarding the details, please post them in the comments below and I will do my best to answer them or at least point you toward some answers.

Big Announcement! Battle is Joined!

A gun fires the signal to start, the contestants are out of the gates in a rush, the crowds roar with excitement... no, this isn't a horse race, it's a blog contest!

Last week my friend Jon was thinking about all the stuff he'd been doing, all the stuff I'm doing and what we could both do better. I think he's been wanting to write for quite some time, but hadn't found a topic to write about or a place to write it. He sent me a message on Skype: "You and I should have a blog off! That might actually modivate both of us to become better bloggers" and so it began.

The rules: After discussing what a fair and reliable metric would be, we decided to use daily views averaged over a week and tallied monthly to measure our progress. If that sounds confusing, don't worry about it, we'll be keeping track ourselves. We've got October to start building a following and we'll be measuring monthly starting November 14th. If either one of us quits writing after a decisive win and loses viewers, the win is forfeited. We'll also be cross linking and coordinating some of our posts to boost our total audience.

How you can help: Just keep reading. Tell your friends, write comments, join in the discussion, send me ideas, ask me to research things and keep coming back. The more you demand of me, the more I will deliver. Share my writing on Facebook, on twitter, on Google +, whatever you use. I have links to help you do that on each of my posts. If some part of my blog isn't working, let me know so I can fix it. I want to win, of course, and the way I'll do that is with you're help.

My first entry: The ideas behind this contest are actually pretty interesting. To fix a motivation in the mind to continue to perform a certain action (blog posting) on a more regular and frequent basis we set up a reward for success, and an accountability program to measure that success. Here, the anticipation of a reward (kudos, bragging rights, more followers, beating Jon at something) will be used as my drive and energy to complete the task set before me and build the habit of writing more regular updates to this currently pitiful blog. The writing will hopefully improve as a result of scrutiny, or at least not backslide. The topics will hopefully be more accessible to a wider audience, though no less biting. During this exercise, which I hope will last years, I will try to exercise increasing amounts of self control to post entries more often and more regularly to please my audience.

For now, the reward is purely anticipatory, though as the contest continues it should become a learned association between writing blogs and winning bragging rights and readers. Having intellectually set the parameters of the contest, both of us participants await the benefits from classically conditioning ourselves to better behaviours. To those of my readers unfamiliar with classical conditioning, it was first formally observed by Ivan Pavlov when he trained his dogs to salivate to the ringing of a bell. I will compare the current design to his: The unconditioned stimulus presented to the dogs was a bit of meat or meat powder. For this contest, the stimulus is recognition. The unconditioned response to the presentation of that meat was salivation. For the contest, the response is pride or happiness. The unconditioned stimulus was then paired with a neutral stimulus, a bell, by presenting them together and observing the response of salivation. Our neutral stimulus is blog posting, which is paired by the artificial recognition in addition to the generated recognition of our audience as it grows. After a while, the bell can produce salivation without the meat. Soon, I hope to enjoy posting regular blogs whether anyone reads them or not.

In addition to the classical conditioning, we'll use a feedback loop to gauge performance. The number of viewers a post receives initially will show how relevant or immediately interesting a topic is. The number of viewers a post continues to get will show how much it resonates with the audience. The month to month analysis of results also serves as a feedback loop because it is on going and allows us to gauge personal performance in comparison to another. Basically, The feedback loop will encourage both Jon and I to alter our blogging tactics to attract more readers.

I can go a bit further along this topic of motivation and needs. I can reference Maslow's Hierarchy and where the blogging fits into it. Maslow's Hierarchy, in short is a list of needs that must be accomplished in order. Once one is fulfilled, a person can move along to the next until a more basic need must be re-fulfilled.

This blog post and contest can work toward all three of the upper tiered needs. It works toward love and belonging by putting ideas out there that friends and family may find interesting in one way or another and thus promote closeness. It builds esteem by soliciting favorable responses from others, whether I know them personally or not. It promotes my self-concept and encourages a growth in respect and other social standing. Trolls, though they will be deleted, may also serve as a measure of success as they mostly target highly public Internet venues. Finally, this blog and contest build my self-actualization in that I am allowed to be creative, be spontaneous, and solve problems. Any other parts of this that people read into it are probably relevant, but I will not claim them specifically here.

Finally: I'll wrap up this post by thanking Jon for the wonderful idea. We were going to share links to each other on this first post but he isn't quite ready and thought to distract me with a puzzle. The jumble of characters below is actually a puzzle that he made. I asked him if it would be appropriate for me to share it with my audience and he told me it would be. Anyone cracking the puzzle may be offered some small prize I haven't decided on yet. Post answers in the comments and expect a later post to announce the first correct solution and an actual link to the competing blog, like I originally planned to include here.

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