Deepak Chopra knows not everyone will get his message. Particularly this time.

His new book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, is a journey into a world deeper than reality. Its about moving from what you know to what you can be. And its deep.

But the renowned best-selling author and spiritual guru wont leave you hanging. He outlines steps to help you get there. Chopra will talk about his new book Friday at Unity of Houston.

In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, Chopra explains his message.

ON RENEWHOUSTON.COM:What is mindfulness, anyway?

Metahuman sounds like something from a sci-fi show. What does it mean to you?

Its a deep understanding of a fundamental reality, as opposed to a perceptual reality. Perceptual reality is what youre experiencing right now in this moment through your senses. A fundamental reality is a conscious agent. You are a conscious agent or a soul thats having a human experience.

How do you live like a meta human when theres so much going on?

By Deepak Chopra, M.D.

Author appearance

Deepak Chopra will talk about his new book and what it means to metahuman at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Unity of Houston, 2929 Unity Drive.

Well, you could stop every few hours, take a few deep breaths and ask yourself, Am I awake right now? Am I aware right now? Thats a start.

You book has a 31-day guide at the end. Why is it important to give steps?

If you want to make a word into a sentence or a paragraph or a story, then you have to know how to do that step-by-step. So we are building a case for fundamental reality step-by-step.

Earlier this year you announced a GoFundMe campaign to bring awareness to suicide prevention and mental well-being through a global movement called NeverAlone. Can you talk about it?

Every day you read about suicide in the newspapers. The second most common cause of death among children and adolescents (ages 10-24). Theres something drastically wrong with us if our children feel so desperate that they have to kill themselves. You know its an act of ultimate desperation and not being connected with loved ones, and with the world. Theres something wrong globally with our mental state, so mental well-being should be our priority and particularly taking care of our next generation.

MINDFULNESS FOR THIRD GRADERS? See how meditation and yoga can help kids ward off anxiety and depression, only on HoustonChronicle.com

How do you personally stay centered?

I dont take myself seriously. I pay attention to my family life. I just do what I enjoy and if it doesnt have a meaning or purpose for me, then I dont do it. I focus on three things: service, community and spiritual practice. I also asked myself, Is it going to make a difference? If not, I don't do it.

Why is getting centered so hard?

Because we are bamboozled into thinking that theres something out there that will make us happy.

How do you encourage people to stay positive in the thick of the political season?

When you realize how insane the whole thing is you dont get involved. You just go and vote for that person that comes close to your ideas and then let the unknown take over. Thats my attitude.

joy.sewing@chron.com

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Deepak Chopra ponders what it means to be human - Houston Chronicle

What is meant by the phrase game changer? Who or what can that phrase be applied to? Most often its applied to sporting events or war. But what would it mean if it were applied to your life.

Game changer refers to a shift in outcomes, either good or bad. If you are not pleased with the events or circumstances of your life, a change of some kind would be a game changer for you.

Sometimes a game changer is as simple as a change in attitude from one of dejection, lack, and inertia to one of gratitude, abundance, and boundless energy.

Tall order? Maybe not. It is often extraordinary the kinds of changes that show up in our lives when it is viewed through a different lens.

It is often extraordinary the kinds of changes that show up in our lives when it is viewed through a different lens.

When you start from a place of gratitude, really internalizing all that is right in your life, you have affected the outcome. You have uncovered a game changer called gratitude.

If you are wondering what you have to be grateful for, start with the small things and what you can label as the treasures of your heart. Begin by filling your heart with gratitude for simply being.

When you wake up in the morning what is the first and most obvious of your treasures? You woke up! Not enough to be grateful for? Then think of the many who did not wake up.

Once you begin to takeinventory of your treasures, things to be grateful for, you are better able toface life from a different, more positive attitudeone of thankfulness. Gratitudebecomes a game changer.

The benefits of gratitude are numerous. To start with, gratitude lowers stress, which we all know is unhealthy. When you have a sense of gratitude, you can successfully cope with the challenges that come your way, you have more enthusiasm as you face the day.

It will actually prove difficult to feel defeated or depressed when you are grateful.

Gratitude helps youput life in perspective as it enhances your wellbeing. When you have a more positive,can-do perspective, success is easier to attain.

By expressing gratitude for even the small positive aspects of your life, you are likely to feel happier and more optimistic. You will feel more in charge.

Wouldnt you prefer to face the day in a more positive I can do it frame of mind? What a game changer that would be for so many people! Would it be for you, too?

If you are struggling with finding that place of gratitude in your life, start small.

For example, when you make your to-do list in the morning or you are in some way reviewing the coming day, think of one small thing that you are grateful for. Write it down, either at the top of your to-do list or in a journal.

This exercise should get easier everyday and your list should begin to grow. If it is still difficult for you to feel grateful, talk to someone who can help your through it and recommend other exercises you can try so that you can uncover your gratitude treasure.

You see, gratitude really is a game changer that can affect your life on so many levels.

It affects your physical and mental health, your relationship with others and your satisfaction with your career or job. You are more likely to feel optimistic and you can better position yourself for success in whatever you attempt to do.

Previously publishedon Goodmenproject.com

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Gratitude is a Game Changer - Thrive Global

In 2012, as she approached her thirty-eighth birthday, Irena, a single lawyer living in Warsaw, began researching fertility clinics with a friend. Neither woman had been having much luck datingIrena blames her feminist attitude, which is not widely shared in conservative Polandbut they didnt want to miss out on parenthood. Browsing the Web sites of the clinics, they noticed that almost all of them featured only photos of couples. Irenas friend phoned to confirm that they would treat single women, too.

Irenas first five artificial-insemination attempts failed, and so did her first attempt at in-vitro fertilization, in which eggs are retrieved from a patients ovaries and fertilized before being transferred to the uterus. At the time, the Polish government was offering to reimburse heterosexual couples for their fertility treatments. The procedures were expensive, and Irena, being single, had to pay for them herself. Still, her second round of IVF, in the summer of 2015, looked promising. She got six quality embryos, froze four, and transferred the other two.

That summer, the laws covering fertility treatment in Poland were shifting. Informed by the Vaticans absolute opposition to IVF, the socially conservative Law and Justice Party, known by its Polish acronym, PiS, had put forward legislation that would ban IVF and criminalize its provision. PiS held a minority in Polands parliament, but support for the party was growing. A revised version of the IVF bill, seen as a compromise between conservative, Church-backed parties and the governing centrist coalition, proposed to restrict fertility treatment to heterosexual couples who were married or living together. It would require clinics to get signatures from would-be mothers and fathers, who pledged to take legal and financial responsibility for any children they had as a result of the treatment, before IVF could take place.

This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

That June, the compromise law passed. I live in a horrible, patriarchal, conservative country, Irena thought, when she heard about it. Luckily, her transfer had worked, and, in Augusttwo months before the new law was to take effectshe learned that she was pregnant. Then, at ten weeks, she miscarried. The law was now in effect, and, as a single woman, she was blocked from accessing her own frozen embryos unless she could convince a male friend to sign with her. This would make him financially liable for her child and grant him custody rights. Moreover, another provision in the law, intended to insure that unused embryos wouldnt be destroyed, mandated that they be donated to an infertile heterosexual couple if they werent used within twenty years. The four remaining frozen embryos, stored in a cryotank, were Irenas last chance at parenthood. There was now a real possibility that theyd be given to someone else.

Irenawho, like the other single women I interviewed for this story, requested that her name be changed to protect her identityis a cheerful person, partial to loose, comfortable clothing and statement necklaces. Recounting her experience, at the dining table of my Warsaw Airbnb, she was indignant. For me, it was something unimaginable to agree with this legal situation, that my embryos are waiting for me and I cannot have access to them, she said. So I tried to think, what to do?

For the past few decades, church attendance in Poland has been declining; still, eighty-six per cent of Polish citizens identify as Catholic. In 2008, the Vatican released the Instruction Dignitas Personae on Certain Bioethical Questions, a document that updated its older guidance on reproductive technologies. The Instruction declared it ethically unacceptable to dissociate procreation from the integrally personal context of the conjugal act. In another passage, IVF and abortion are linked as morally repellent expressions of a world view that reduces human life to a disposable commodity. The desire for a child cannot justify the production of offspring, the authors argue, just as the desire not to have a child cannot justify the abandonment or destruction of a child once he or she has been conceived.

Many Catholics object to the fact that embryos are routinely discarded during the IVF process: in explaining the opposition of Polish Catholics to IVF, Tymoteusz Zych, a legal scholar at the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culturea conservative, Warsaw-based think tank, which has advocated for a total ban on abortioncited the notion of human embryos as human beings. Zych also invoked the science-fiction film Gattaca, from 1997, in which society is divided between those who can afford to genetically engineer their children and those who cannot. A common step in IVF treatment is pre-implantation genetic testing, in which embryos are screened for genetic defects. This may lead to elimination from society of certain groups, Zych told me. Human nature is not perfect; human nature is complex. And, as we deal with something as basic as the fertilization of human beings, we have to be extremely cautious.

And yet, in Poland, conservative opposition to IVF is not driven solely by religion. The first Polish IVF child was born in 1987, in the northeastern city of Bialystok; after the collapse of Communism, private fertility clinics proliferated. Some Church officials condemned them from the outset. But it wasnt until 2003, as Poland prepared to join the European Union, that politicians seized on IVF as a nationalist issue. Some borrowed language from the countrys ongoing abortion debate, tying IVF to what they called the Wests civilization of death. Others connected it with Europes cultural liberalism, against which they see Poland as a Christian bulwark. Around the world, reproductive technologies and their consequences have raised novel and complex questions about who or what counts as family, or even as a person. But in Poland these questions have become especially charged. As Magdalena Radkowska-Walkowicz, an anthropologist at the University of Warsaw, has written, the technology has become a screen onto which its opponents can project both new and time-honored fears.

Anti-IVF rhetoric takes a number of forms. Polish politicians and religious leaders have sometimes described IVF using nationalistic overtones that scholars have connected to a resurgent anti-Semitism. Catholic media routinely depict children conceived through IVF as unnatural and genetically suspect; in a survey of Polish articles about IVF children, Radkowska-Walkowicz found that they were often characterized as suffering from physical deformities, such as a protruding forehead or dangling tongue, or from mental illnesses, including survivor syndrome in relation to unused embryos. (There is no evidence for these claims.) These purported defects are said to go undetectedand so, Radkowska-Walkowicz writes, IVF children are imagined to lurk among the general population, their biological otherness polluting the Polish body politic.

Other IVF opponents position themselves as protectors of frozen embryos. In Poland, the political scientist Janine P. Holc writes, the embryo is sometimes seen as the purest citizenan unformed innocent in need of protection by the Polish constitution. Anna Krawczak, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw and the former chairperson of the patient-advocacy group Nasz Bocian (the name means Our Stork), which has fought for a more inclusive IVF law, told me that IVF opponents have found inventive ways of linking the procedure to abortion. Protesters gather in front of IVF clinics holding posters that show images of human fetuses, icy blue against a black background. Each fetus bears an imagined name: MarysiaFrozen, MarcinFrozen, OlekFrozen, OlaFrozen. The last protester in line holds a color photo of a sleeping, cherubic baby boy: MateuszHes the only one who made it . . . . So intense is the debate around IVF, Krawczak told me, that the frozen embryo is one of the main political actors in Poland.

I believe in God, yes, Magda, a thirty-nine-year-old human-resources specialist living in Warsaw, told me, in May. Maybe Im not going to church as often as I would like. Magda is fairly typical of many Polish young people. Even as it remains connected to the Catholic Church, Poland is coming to resemble the rest of Europe culturally; it has a growing economy, and in its larger cities, such as Warsaw and Krakow, young Poles gather in cafs and bars and meet on Tinder. (Many also work for long stretches in other European countries.) Even to the devout, the alarmist rhetoric about IVF has not proved entirely persuasive. In 2015, a leading Polish polling group, the Public Opinion Research Center, found that seventy-six per cent of Poles supported IVF for married couples, and forty-four per cent supported it for single women.

Like Irena, Magda spent most of her twenties searching for the right partner. My mom sometimes told me, You have too high standards, she recalled, laughing. I said, Mom, I could walk on my standards. At thirty-four, prompted by the difficulty a younger, married friend encountered when trying to conceive, Magda went for a fertility checkup. She was alarmed to learn that she had the biological profile of a forty-year-old. At first, she thought of freezing her eggs. She learned, though, that she was likely to produce fewer of them than a younger woman would, and that eggs can be damaged in the freezing-and-thawing process. In the end, she decided to choose a sperm donor and create embryos, which have a better chance of surviving freezing and thawing, even though such a step precluded the possibility of using the sperm of an eventual boyfriend or husband. In February, 2015, Magdas doctor retrieved four eggs. Two were successfully fertilized. She envisioned telling her future partner about them: it was unfortunate, shed say, that they couldnt conceive a child together, but I have, in the refrigerator, a couple of babies.

After the retrieval, she and her doctor decided to freeze the embryos for a few months before transferring them, so that her body could recover from IVFs gruelling hormonal-stimulation regime. Magda was singularly focussed on having a baby; she wasnt paying close attention to the news, which was filled with debates on the IVF law. When her employer unexpectedly offered her a two-year contract in Krakow, Polands charming second city, she figured that she could keep her embryos on ice until she returned to Warsaw, where her family lives. At the end of 2016, as she was moving back to Warsaw, Magda made an appointment at her clinic. In an examination room, her doctor said that he was no longer able to help her. By then, shed begun following media coverage of the new law; she realized that, as a single woman, she could be denied fertility care. She had never considered, however, that she might be barred from accessing her already-created embryos, which had been made from her own genetic material at a time when it was completely legal to receive treatment. Now I cant do anything, she said. Ruefully, she noted that, despite having no say over their future, she still bears financial responsibility for the embryos and pays annual rent to the clinic where they are stored.

The experience has sharpened Magdas political consciousness. Although she did not vote in the October, 2015 election, in which PiS won a majority in the Polish parliamentIm furious at myself for this, she saidshe told me that she planned to drag everyone she knew to the polls for the next parliamentary election. (The 2019 election took place this October; PiS won another majority.) She lambasted the current government for its hypocrisy regarding family issues. In 2016, at the same time it was barring single women from using IVF, the PiS-led government began paying new parents a monthly child allowance of five hundred zloty per child (around a hundred and thirty dollars) in an effort to boost Polands birth rate. Everyone says, Yes, its amazing to have babies. Make them! . . . Have five hundred zloty for a baby, Magda said. O.K., so why cant I do it? Im not a pathological liar. Im not a psycho. Her voice rose. Im a normal, loving person who would like to have a family.

Scholars use the term selective pronatalism to describe the adoption of social policies that encourage childbearing for some groups while discouraging it for others. Some of the lawyers and doctors I spoke to believe that, although most media coverage of the IVF law focussed on how single women would be affected, its restrictions were actually designed with queer people in mind. Queer couples in Poland can neither marry nor form civil unions; if they have children while abroad, they must hire lawyers to request citizenship for those children, and it is granted only on a case-by-case basis. Under the banner of the five-hundred-zloty program, PiS has established itself as one of Europes leading pro-family parties, inspiring similar programs in Serbia and Lithuania. In doing so, however, it has reinforced a narrow vision of what being pro-family meansone from which single and queer parents are excluded.

Maria, a thirty-eight-year-old designer living in Warsaw, always wanted a partner and family but never found the right person. Three years ago, she began surveying her options. She learned that, under the new law, it was impossible for her to receive fertility treatment in Poland; after several months of research and reflection, she decided to order sperm from Cryos, a Danish sperm bank, and attempt intracervical insemination (the so-called turkey-baster method) herself, at home. In an e-mail, she told me that shed derived a sense of agency from undertaking the procedure herself. It was counterbalanced, though, by feeling completely abandoned by your own country. . . . I realized one day that, despite being a good citizen, I dont deserve the same rights as the rest of the society, only because Im not married or in a legal relationship. She added, It pisses me [off] big time.

Maria and I met for dinner on a warm evening this spring. Wearing jeans and a marinire, with elegantly tousled dirty-blond hair, she was in good spirits, even though her first few attempts to get pregnant hadnt worked. She showed me photos of the canister in which the sperm samples had arrived, each in its own plastic straw; she planned to try six times, she said, after which she would travel to Denmark for IVF treatment. If she been able to buy sperm samples in Poland, they would have cost between four and six hundred zlotyaround a hundred and thirty dollarseach. The samples she chose cost around thirteen hundred dollars each, including tax and shipping.

Maria told me about I Wont Apologize for Giving Birth, a book on IVF families that was published, in 2015, by Karolina Domagalska, a Polish journalist. The title captured her attitude, she said: Im not going to be sorry. Im not going to be apologizing to anybody for doing what Im doing. Its ironic, she thinks, that Polands nationalist government is compelling its women to conceive with foreign sperm. You are sending a bunch of rich, loaded womenlets face itto spend a hell of a lot of money outside the country, and to where? To Denmark, which is already rich, she said. And we are saying, Oh, we are [such a] poor country, we want our Polish citizens to buy Polish products. Well, excuse meIm spending forty thousand zloty on Danish products, F.Y.I.

Shortly after PiS won its first parliamentary majority, in 2015, it packed Polands constitutional tribunal, which rules on whether laws are compatible with the countrys constitution, with conservative judges. In April of last year, the tribunal reviewed a case brought in October, 2015, by Adam Bodnar, Polands ombudsman for human rights. Bodnar had requested that the tribunal clarify whether and how the IVF law would apply to single, female patients, such as Magda and Irena, who had begun treatment before its passage. The tribunal sidestepped the question of single womens access to IVF, arguing that it could rule only on the text of the law, not on its collateral effects. But it also cited Article 30 of Polands constitution, which focusses on human rights and liberties. All of those liberties, the Tribunal argued, were based on the concept of human dignity; anything less than a family with both a mother and a father would deprive the embryo of the dignity to which, as a conceived child and a Polish citizen, it was entitled.

Sylwia Spurek, the former deputy ombudsperson for human rights, who worked on the constitutional tribunal case in her first weeks on the job, told me that the verdict, while disappointing, was legally sound. (The tribunal does not, in fact, have to rule on issues not explicitly addressed in the text of a law.) This leaves the affected women with little legal recourse. It was possible, Spurek said, that, if someone were to bring a case before the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, the court might compel the Polish government to compensate some women for damages. But she did not believe that the European Court could force the government to permit women access to their embryos. Spurek is a longtime public servant, who has worked under six prime ministers. In her opinion, the current government is merely upholding a Polish political tradition of disregard for women. I cannot see a huge difference, unfortunately, she said. There was no government that was on the side of women, in the whole of my career.

To Irena, the law is an attempt by a patriarchal government to enforce a family structure that depends on men. Irena, who was raised by a single, divorced mother, can verify that families without men exist and thrive. Meanwhile, as a lawyer who specializes in family law, she sees many cases in which it seems to her that a child would be better off living with one parent than with two parents who hate each other. In holding this view, she finds that she is in the minority, even among her educated, single friends. A lot of women in Poland, even if they are single, they have this attitude that a child needs a father, she said. I have a lot of friends who are single, and I know only one who thought the way I did.

In my Airbnb, over takeout sushi, Irena read over the tribunals judgment. As she translated one conservative judges opinion from Polish into English, she could barely contain her frustration. As I can understand it, he says that, for this conceived child, who he considers a human being, its better to stay for twenty years and after be adopted, not by his biological mother but by some other [couple], than to be born by his biological mother, she said, bitterly. For me, it seems quite absurd.

Irena and the other women in her situation do have one way of getting around the IVF law: they can ask their clinics to ship their frozen eggs or embryos to clinics in other countries. Beginning in early 2016, Irena began trying to find a home for her embryos outside of Poland. First, she arranged to ship them to the Institut Marqus, a clinic in Barcelona. Everything was going smoothly until we received the documentation from Poland that confirms the embryos were created with a non-anonymous sperm donor, a medical assistant wrote to Irena. Unfortunately in Spain we are only allowed to do anonymous donation, and so if a donor is known, we cannot accept the embryos.

In April, she contacted the Copenhagen Fertility Centerperhaps, she thought, the staff there might feel a patriotic duty toward the Danish sperm shed usedbut she received only a succinct and unhelpful reply refusing her business. She began corresponding successfully with a clinic in Latvia when her mother fell gravely ill. To care for her, Irena put her fertility search on hold. The next year, she reached out to the Latvian clinic again, but they had trouble with her Polish clinic. Good day, Now the rules is changes, and in this moment . . . we cant get from [your clinic] all necessary documents, someone named Katerina informed her, in March, 2017.

Irena discovered a branch of the Institut Marqus in Ireland, a country that permits non-anonymous gamete donation. (Although seventy-eight per cent of Irish citizens identify as Catholic, reproductive technologies are not as controversial there.) She arranged for her clinic to sign the necessary paperwork and booked her embryos passage with a company called IVF Couriers (Bespoke courier services for the next generation). More than a year earlier, before shed begun trying to ship her embryos abroad, Cryos, the Danish sperm bank, had notified her that, somewhere in the world, a child created with her donors sperm had been born with a birth defect. Irena wasnt too worriedthere was no way of knowing whether the defect was due to the sperm, the egg, or chance. But, just before her embryos were scheduled to ship, the board of the Institut Marqus in Barcelona checked with its Irish arm and found out about what they called her donors condition. The board decided to reject her embryosa precaution, Irena assumed, meant to uphold their success rates, which potential clients use to evaluate clinics. Irena understood why an adverse birth outcome would preclude any future use of that donors sperm. But if these embryos already exist, and they are mine, then my idea is it is up to me... whether I want to take the risk and use them or not, she said. I think this was the hardest moment.

Katarzyna Koziol, a doctor who co-founded one of Polands largest IVF centers, in 1994, told me that, at her clinic alone, around a hundred women had been affected by the law; an analysis by Nasz Bocian, the patient-advocacy group, suggested that about five per cent of fertility-clinic patients in Poland were single women. (Koziol, who is the president of the Polish Society of Reproductive Medicine and Embryology, consulted on the IVF law, arguing that it should be more inclusive; the laws omission of single women, she said, was one of its weak points.) After the law was passed, her staff received calls from many women asking what they should do. Often, the women opted to transfer their eggs or embryos to a clinic abroad. And yet every countrys laws reflect different attitudes toward assisted reproductive technology, or ART. Recently, in an article for Politico, Marion Sollety described how Frances history of resistance to health care as a business has led that country to ban technologies such as elective egg-freezing, driving women who need them to Spain. (Amid protests from conservatives, President Emmanuel Macrons government is trying to liberalize French ART regulation.) The sociologist Elzbieta Korolczuk points out that, in Poland, the law and rhetoric around ART has had the effect of nationalizing the embryos, so that, instead of being the private property of the person who commissioned their creation, they are public citizen subjects, who are under the protection of the state.

Governments have an interest in protecting human life, especially when its vulnerable; thats why they prohibit murder, tax cigarettes, mandate seat belts, and remove children from abusive homes. The Polish government has long maintained that its responsibility for protecting human life begins at conception. In the case of abortion, a governments desire to protect life at a prenatal stage must come at the expense of the rights of women who wish to end their pregnancies. But Polands IVF law introduces a novel version of this trade-off, in which protecting embryos compromises the rights of the not-yet-pregnant women whove created them. The government must exercise something like eminent domainover biological tissue, or property, or perhaps over a person.

A fertilized egg develops into an embryo after its implanted in a uterus, where it can grow; after the eighth week, that embryo becomes a fetus. Technically, the frozen embryos stored by a fertility clinic are pre-embryos, because they have not yet been implanted. According to European Union regulations, a pre-embryo is considered tissue: it must be handled, stored, and transported according to a 2004 directive that also addresses bone marrow for transplants and skin for grafts. But its possible to ask whether a pre-embryos genetic uniqueness, or its potential to grow into a human being, sets it apart from other tissues. There is no easy way to answer this question. Conception, artificial or otherwise, is so uncertain that each pre-embryo, once its implanted, has only a one-in-three chance of growing into a human being. Meanwhile, despite this uncertainty, many resourcesfinancial, biological, and emotionalhave gone into its creation. Some pre-embryos are made entirely from a couples genetic material; others include donor genes; some lack any genetic tie to their would-be parent or parents. Many aspects of an embryos past, present, and future could bear on the question of who is responsible for its care and destiny.

It took two years, but Irena eventually managed to have her embryos exported to a clinic in Lviv, Ukraine. I asked her how often, and in what terms, she had thought about the embryos during that time. Its related to your attitude to reproductive rights in general, so I dont think about them as babies, because Im a feminist, she said. I try not to humanize them, but of course I have a strong feeling that I am the person whos entitled to decide what to do with them. She paused. I just dont accept this system, that there is somebody else who takes this decision instead of me. So lets say, I think we can use this word, property.

Ewa, a stylish, blond entertainment-industry professional, was almost a casualty of the 2015 law. Now forty-eight, she began fertility treatment in the spring of that year, when she was forty-four. Her first attempt at IVF yielded only one egg. She concluded that she didnt have time for what she called expensive experiments. In Junethe same month that the IVF law passedshe went to a clinic in the central city of d. The doctor there told her that she had to act immediately, choosing both a sperm donor and an egg donor and completing IVF, before the law went into effect.

Ewa had already found a sperm donor she liked, from Cryos, the Danish sperm bank. On his profile, he explained that hed decided to donate sperm after he and his partner became parentshe wanted others to be as happy as they were. That was beautiful, the way he wrote it, she said. It was funny. I fell in love with this donor. But the decision to move forward with donor eggs was more difficult. If it werent for the law, she said, she would have tried once more with her own eggs.

Within a month, the clinic had located three potential egg donors. She chose one, who produced five high-quality eggs, all of which fertilized. On September 5th, less than a month before the law took effect, the clinic transferred two of the resulting embryos. Ewa worried about what would happen if neither embryo took. She is now the mother of twins.

Ewa is decidedly unattached to the embryos she left behind in the clinic. She hasnt received a storage bill for them since her treatment concluded, and hasnt called to find out what has happened to them. Since, by law, they cant be destroyed, she assumes that they are either still in storage or have been donated. She is excited about the latter prospect. My kids are great, she said. She likes to think that there are, or will be, three more wonderful children out there who are related to her own. The laws imperative to donate unused embryos could, potentially, make her small family something larger. One day, were going to meet them, if they want to meet us, she told me.

Seen through a feminist, progressive lens, assisted reproductive technologies have emancipatory potential; they have the power to expand the definition of family, creating new familial configurations and notions of relatedness. Polands IVF law, by contrast, suggests what can happen when such technologies take root in a society thats determined to remain traditional. Single motherhood is neither new nor radical; women have always raised children on their own, for any number of reasons (death, abandonment, divorce). The law, in attempting to preserve a narrow notion of what a family should be, has had the perverse effect of severing the mother-child bond. A government that confiscates a mothers embryos so that it can encourage only the right kinds of families creates its own kind of brave new world.

When Irena and I last corresponded, in September, she was twenty-eight weeks pregnant, following a successful embryo transfer in Lviv. She had notified her boss of her pregnancy, and he immediately congratulated her without asking any awkward questions; her mother is excited to become a grandmother. Paradoxically, she said, it was the laws fundamental injustice that steeled her resolve to keep going. After this law was passed, all the doubts disappeared, and I felt very strongly convinced that I have to continue, and that I cant abandon my embryos, she told me. We can say that this law helped me, but only in the sense of the state of my mind, and being confident that this is a good idea, and that I should keep trying.

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When the Government Seizes Your Embryos - The New Yorker

[NEW YORK] Not long ago, Stephanie Heller, a New Jersey real estate agent, was leaving her gym after a workout when she noticed a woman in the parking lot struggling to bend down. "I don't know if she dropped something and had to pick it up, or if her shoe was untied," Ms Heller said, but she eagerly bounded over to help. The woman blamed old age for her incapacity, explaining that she was 70. But Heller was 71.

"This woman felt every bit her age," she recalled. "I don't let age stop me. I think it's a mindset, really."

Each of us has a chronological age, the number we commemorate on birthdays. But some 50-, 60- and 70-year-olds look and feel youthful, while others do not. Scientists can measure these differences by looking at age-related biomarkers things like skin elasticity, blood pressure, lung capacity and grip strength. People with a healthy lifestyle and living conditions and a fortunate genetic inheritance tend to score "younger" on these assessments and are said to have a lower "biological age."

But there's a much easier way to determine the shape people are in. It's called "subjective age."

When scientists ask, "How old do you feel, most of the time?" the answer tends to reflect the state of people's physical and mental health. "This simple question seems to be particularly powerful," says Antonio Terracciano, a professor of geriatrics at Florida State University College of Medicine in Tallahassee.

Scientists are finding that people who feel younger than their chronological age are typically healthier and more psychologically resilient than those who feel older. They perform better on memory tasks and are at lower risk of cognitive decline. In a study published in 2018, a team of South Korean researchers scanned the brains of 68 healthy older adults and found that those who felt younger than their age had thicker brain matter and had endured less age-related deterioration. By contrast, people who feel older than their chronological age are more at risk for hospitalization, dementia and death.

"We have found many, many predictive associations," says Yannick Stephan, an assistant professor of health and aging psychology at the University of Montpellier in France who has been at the forefront of subjective age research.

If you're over 40, chances are you feel younger than your driver's license suggests. Some 80 per cent of people do, according to Mr Stephan. A small fraction of people fewer than 10 per cent feel older. The discrepancy between felt and actual age increases with the years, Terracciano said. At age 50, people may feel about five years, or 10 per cent, younger, but by the time they're 70, they may feel 15 per cent or even 20 per cent younger.

Most of the research on subjective age is based on associations between how old people feel and their health status, so it cannot establish cause and effect. It's not clear, for example, whether feeling younger actually makes people healthier, or people who are already healthy tend to feel younger.

For Francisca Mercado-Ruiz of South Plainfield, New Jersey, getting healthier transformed her internal sense of age. In the months leading up to her 49th birthday last December, she fulfilled her goal of losing 49 pounds. Before the weight loss, she had back and hip pain and felt like she was 65. Now she's off her blood pressure medication, full of energy, has few aches and says she feels 35.

A few intriguing studies suggest that a youthful frame of mind can have a powerful effect. When scientists trick older people into feeling younger, most tend to instantly become more capable. In a 2013 experiment by Mr Stephan and colleagues, for example, people's grip strength significantly improved after they were told that they were stronger than most people their age. A Chinese study published in November 2018 in the journal Aging & Mental Health found that people performed better on a memory task after being told they were sharper than others their age.

Whether these findings translate into real-world situations, however, is uncertain. In a 2018 German study, investigators asked people in their 60s, 70s and early 80s how old they felt, then measured their walking speed in two settings. Participants walked 20 feet in the laboratory while being observed and timed. They also wore belts containing an accelerometer while out and about in their daily lives. Those who reported feeling younger tended to walk faster during the lab assessment. But feeling younger had no impact on their walking speed in real life. Instead, the researchers found, the ones who walked faster were those who walked the most.

What makes subjective age such a powerful predictor? Mr Stephan believes that people possess intuitive information about their physical abilities, mental sharpness and emotional stability, all of which gets distilled into a single meaningful number.

But critics assert that for many, subjective age simply reflects cultural obsessions with youth. People cultivate a younger identity to fend off stereotypes of frailty and senility, said David Weiss, a life span psychologist at the University of Leipzig. "If old age weren't negatively valued, you wouldn't have the need to say that you feel younger," he said.

Indeed, in cultures where elders are respected for their wisdom and experience, people don't even understand the concept of subjective age, he said. When a graduate student of Mr Weiss' did research in Jordan, the people he spoke with "would say: I'm 80. I don't know what you mean by How old do I feel?'"

Paradoxically, older people may hold warm feelings for their generation even as they feel distaste for people their age. In a 2012 experiment, Mr Weiss and a colleague divided 104 people ages 65 to 88 into two groups. All had to complete five sentences, but members of one group were asked to describe people their age, while those in the other were asked about their generation.

The first group wrote things like "People of my age are afraid and worry about the future" and "People of my age often talk about their illnesses." The generation-oriented group displayed a stronger sense of empowerment and meaning. Those members wrote things like "People of my generation were the 68ers who founded a more civil society," a reference to the student protest movements of the late 1960s, and "People of my generation should pass on their life experience to the youth." One way to combat internalized ageism, Weiss suggests, is to identify with one's generation.

A similar feeling of shared purpose and belonging keeps Thomas Dortch Jr, 69, an Atlanta businessman and philanthropist, vibrant. People take him for being in his early 50s when they first meet him, and he says he feels like he's in his early 40s.

As national chairman of the organization 100 Black Men of America, he nurtures the next generation of black leaders. "I've been focused all my life on being engaged and working to make sure that life is better for future generations," he said. "I can never be too tired to make a difference."

Whatever their stance on subjective age, experts agree that healthy habits, including eating well and exercising, can keep age-related deterioration at bay. Just as important is keeping a positive attitude. Internalized ageism can worsen not just people's outlook but their health. Experts urge that people recognize not just the losses associated with aging but also the significant gains.

As we age, we tend to become generally happier and more satisfied, said Dr Tracey Gendron, a gerontologist at Virginia Commonwealth University who questions the whole notion of subjective age research. Let's say someone who is 60 says she feels 45, Gendron said. What does that actually mean? Clearly, she doesn't feel how she did 15 years earlier, because people constantly mature and change. So whose 45 does she feel?

In 2017, Dr Gendron published a paper suggesting that the study of subjective age may be inherently unethical. "I think we have to ask ourselves the question, are we feeding the larger narrative of aging as decline by asking that question?" she said. "Older age is a time that we can actually look forward to. People really just enjoy themselves more and are at peace with who they are. I would love for everyone to say their age at every year and celebrate it."

NYTIMES

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Youre only as old as you feel - The Business Times

When Bracke was born in the late 1980s, video games were still being assimilated into mainstream American culture. Today they are ubiquitous. Globally, more than two billion people play video games, including 150 million Americans (nearly half the countrys population), 60 percent of whom game daily. Professional athletes routinely perform goofy victory dances from Fortnite. Game Informer has the fifth-highest circulation of any American magazine, surpassed only by AARPs Magazine and Bulletin, Costco Connection and Better Homes & Gardens. When Grand Theft Auto V was released in September 2013, it generated $1 billion of revenue within three days. No single entertainment product has ever made so much money in so little time. Video games are now one of the most lucrative sectors of the entertainment industry, having overtaken film, television, music and books. Games are also the most popular and profitable type of mobile app, accounting for about a third of all downloads and 75 percent of Apples App Store revenue.

A typical gamer in the United States spends 12 hours playing each week; 34 million Americans play an average of 22 hours per week. About 60 percent of gamers have neglected sleep to keep playing, and about 40 percent have missed a meal. Somewhere around 20 percent have skipped a shower. In 2018, people around the world spent a collective nine billion hours watching other people play video games on the streaming service Twitch three billion more hours than the year before. In South Korea, where more than 95 percent of the population has internet access and connection speeds are the fastest in the world, compulsive game play has become a public-health crisis. In 2011, the South Korean government passed the Shutdown Law, which prevents anyone under 16 from playing games online between midnight and 6 a.m.

Video games are not only far more pervasive than they were 30 years ago; they are also immensely more complex. You could easily spend hundreds of hours not only completing quests but also simply exploring the vast fantasy kingdom in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a gorgeously rendered virtual world in which every blade of grass responds to the pressure of a footstep or the rush of a passing breeze. Fortnite attracted a large and diverse audience by blending the thrill of live events with the strategic combat and outrageous weaponry of first-person shooters, airbrushing it all with a playful cartoon aesthetic. In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the choices players make change the state of the world and ultimately steer them toward one of 36 possible endings. All games whether tabletop, field or electronic are simulations: They create microcosms of the real world or gesture at imaginary ones. But these simulations have become so expansive, intricate and immersive that they can no longer be labeled mere entertainment, no more engrossing than an in-flight movie or a pop song. They are alternate realities.

Even games that are intentionally designed with a retro feel can be surprisingly absorbing. Take Stardew Valley, a quaint farming game with 16-bit graphics that reminded me of the early Pokmon titles for Game Boy. Apart from Candy Crush and word puzzles, I hadnt spent much time playing video games since high school, so, while reporting this article, I decided that Stardew Valley might be an appealing way to reacquaint myself. It seemed like the kind of thing I could play for an hour here or there as my schedule allowed. The premise is simple: You leave your soul-deadening corporate office job and move to the country to revive your grandfathers neglected farm. It seems refreshingly, perhaps deliberately, distinct from all the frenzied and ultracompetitive first-person shooters and survival games. Each day in the game equals about 17 minutes of real-world time, so a week passes in just under two hours.

At first, I was enchanted by the games pastoral setting and its emphasis on collaboration, compassion and discipline. As I became more deeply invested in my pixelated life, though, my attitude changed. I started to lose patience with my neighbors and their daily prattle and stopped noticing all the thoughtful details that once delighted me: the soft glow of fireflies on summer evenings, the fleeting shadow of an owl in flight, the falling petals in spring. And what disturbed me most was the sheer quantity of time I was pouring into the game. It was so easy to play continuously through an afternoon or an evening, in part because the great satisfaction of my achievements was so disproportionate to the effort I expended. I found it extremely difficult to stop playing, even at nighttime, when my character went to sleep, which doubles as a natural point to save your progress and quit. If I kept going, just another 20 minutes, I could get so much done. Compared with the game, everything else in my real life suddenly seemed so much harder and so much less gratifying.

The fact that video games are designed to be addictive is an open secret in the gaming industry. With the help of hired scientists, game developers have employed many psychological techniques to make their products as unquittable as possible. Most video games initially entice players with easy and predictable rewards. To keep players interested, many games employ a strategy called intermittent reinforcement, in which players are surprised with rewards at random intervals. Some video games punish players for leaving by refusing to suspend time: In their absence, the game goes on, and they fall behind. Perhaps the most explicit manifestation of manipulative game design is the rising popularity of loot boxes, which are essentially lotteries for coveted items: a player pays real money to buy a virtual treasure box, hoping it contains something valuable within the world of the game.

As modern video games have become so immersive, their carefully composed dreamscapes have begun to offer a seductive contrast to the indifferent, and sometimes disappointing, world outside screens. Games, by definition, have rules; goals are often explicitly defined; progress is quantified. Although games frequently put players in challenging situations, they continuously offer tutorials, eliminate real-world consequences of failure and essentially guarantee rewards in exchange for effort. Games imbue players with a sense of purpose and accomplishment precisely the kind of self-worth that can be so hard to attain in their actual lives, especially in a job market that can be punishing for the inexperienced.

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Can You Really Be Addicted to Video Games? - The New York Times

Matt Molnar, Guest columnist Published 2:31 p.m. ET Oct. 21, 2019

Matt Molnar, owner and trainer at Atlas Gym on Gaines Street.(Photo: Joe Rondone/Democrat)

It is a fact of life that you cannot maximize your health and wellness without including fitness into your life. While you can lose weight without exercise, the challenge is much easier when you choose to be fit.

Additionally, the statistics have shown consistently that maintaining weight loss is almost impossible without the mental and physical benefits of exercise.

Life is a commitment. Theres a difference between interest and commitment. When youre interested in doing something you do it when its convenient. When youre committed to something, you accept no excuses; only results.

Yes, weight loss success stories dont necessarily require running a marathon. However, exercise at a moderate intensity level must become a part of your daily routine, making it critical to the new you. Initially it seems like a chore, but with persistence, eventually fitness will be a part of your lifeas routine as brushing your teeth.

My definition of discipline is thisDoing what you need to do, when you need to do it, whether you want to or not. It takes some of us longer than others to figure that out, but BAM, when we do, wefind out that discipline can be the bridge between our fitness goals and fitness success. Better to choose the pain in discipline than the pain of regret.

Neglecting to exercise may shorten your life and will definitely affect the quality of your life in later years. If you can have fun when you workout it wont feel like work! Just like one meal wont make you unhealthy, one workout wont make you healthy. Maybe see what happens when you dont give up.

Find the workout thats fun for you. Dont act like a lazy bump on a log; create the vitality and energy you deserve in life. Respect the training, honor the commitment, and cherish the results.

If you think working out is hard, just wait until life hits you. Then you will realize that working out is nothing compared to lifting yourself back up. A healthy lifestyle not only changes your body, it changes your mind, your attitude, and your mood. Each new day is a new opportunity to improve yourself. Take it! And make the most of it.

Put yourself at the top of your to-do list every single day and the rest will fall into place. Whether it's taking a walk, jogging around the neighborhood, bringing a friend to the gym....just do it, as the famous slogan says!

The discipline you learn from getting fit is discipline you take everywhere. The strength you get from physical fitness is strength you carry everywhere. When you improve your fitness, you improve your life.

Vince Lombardi said most people fail, not because of lack of desire, but, because of lack of commitment. We tend to look at the negative side of what we cant do I cant lift that heavy weight.I cant run on a treadmillI cant push that sledI cantI cant!! Look on the positive side of what you can do.

Dont say I cant. Say I presently struggle with... Show up and the rest will fall into place. If you want a healthier tomorrow, make good choices today.

Matt Molnar is the owner of Atlas Fit at 603 W. Gaines St. Visit atlasfit.co.

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Life is a long-term commitment so don't skimp on the exercise | Fitness - Tallahassee Democrat

There used to be a broken man in the mirror, says Falklands veteran Simon Weston CBE, who came as close to killing him as the bombs ever did.

A face he didn't recognise, which people would turn away from, aghast. It took its toll, he adds. And over time, he began to act as terrible as he felt he looked.

Speaking at the Raworths Harrogate Literary Festival, he doesn't shy away from the brutal trauma he's endured.

His strength today comes not from what happened to him, he tells a crowd at The Yorkshire Post literary luncheon, but what he's done about it.

"The simple matter, between winning and losing, is attitude," he says. "If you believe in yourself, or you don't. If you like yourself, or you don't.

"I generally like who I am. I just had a problem, remembering who I used to be."

Read more -> Yorkshire soldier's plea over 'nightmare' battle with PTSD

Read more -> Rate of mental health problems among troops and veterans doubles in a decade

Read more -> Yorkshire cricket legend Dickie Bird - "My fight for survival after terrible stroke"

Explosion aboard Sir Galahad

At 58, Mr Weston is a man of presence, self-deprecating, witty, with carefully chosen words delivered in distinct Welsh rhythm. In 1982, aged 20, he suffered 46 per cent burns after an explosion aboard the craft Sir Galahad.

Forty-eight of his fellow Welsh Guards died that day. Mr Weston was the closest to the bomb who lived, and the worst injured of the entire war to survive.

He jests lightly about his many surgeries, and pilots' fears at transporting him to hospital in case he died en route. But there is a stark reality in his words.

"When that bomb went off, to me it was like Hiroshima," he said. "Everybody was on fire, including myself. I ran and ran.

"It only took a few months of pain, the effects will simply last forever. It's what you lose in that split second, when a bomb blows it all away."

Recovery and resilience

His own mother hadn't recognised him in hospital after his burns, he says, her face 'turning to stone' when she realised the 'poor boy' doctors were wheeling past was her own son.

He credits her strength, and his grandmother's, in helping him to find his own. Through his recovery, Mr Weston spent six years in hospital. He underwent 97 operations.

He was to develop extreme depression, post-traumatic stress disorder. While we are better than we once were at recognising mental trauma for veterans, he tells The Yorkshire Post, there is a long way to go.

Mr Weston, who has written a book on his experience, set up a foundation in 1988 to give young people work and training, and was awarded a CBE in 2016 for his charity work.

The 'scruffy kid' from a Welsh mining village who enrolled at 16 is gone, he says, lost to the bomb and the flames.

He doesn't recognise the man he once saw in the mirror; he is no longer that man.

"I'm not a victim, and I refuse to be one," he says. "I'd rather have respect. Life goes on. If I was going to be a part of it, I was going to have to accept who I was.

"To me, the only failure in the world is to make no attempt," he adds. "I faced change, in the most traumatic manner, and I made it work.

"People have said I was unlucky, but I will take unfortunate," adds Mr Weston. "I'm very fortunate to have survived."

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Falklands veteran Simon Weston on his battle with the 'broken man in the mirror' as he speaks at Harrogate Literary Festival - Yorkshire Post

Gia Venuto was not a cross country runner growing up.

She was a recreational golfer.

She didnt plan on playing either sport in high school.

She ended up excelling in both, capped by a senior season in which she took third in the Portage Trail Conference County Division in cross country and ninth in the PTC in golf.

It turned out, whether she planned on playing or not, the UH Portage Medical Center Athlete of the Week simply had the heart of a competitor.

If Im going to start something, Im not going to just half do it or quit, Venuto said.When I start something, Im going to finish.

That was what Cindy Fesemyer was thinking when she convinced Venuto to come out for golf as a sophomore.

She had a nice swing, but she had that mindset, Fesemyer said.She has that focus, and so you cant teach a lot of that stuff. You cant teach that focus, that want-to. She has just that strong desire to be good.

She needed that desire every ounce of it.

After all, she had less experience than many of her competitors. While others ran cross country in middle school and golfed as freshmen, Venuto was riding her horse. (She competes in eventing an equestrian competition featuring dressage, cross-country and show jumping.)Second, she was rapidly racking up additional activities.

It wasnt supposed to be that way.

When she entered high school, the only sport Venuto thought about doing was track, but former cross country coach Becky Dunn convinced her to take up cross country her freshman year.

It wasnt exactly a match made in heaven.

When I started cross country, I hated it, Venuto said.Im not even going to lie. I hated it. I remember going to practice and just counting every step I took. Im like,Oh my gosh, I cant wait for this to be done.

By the end of her freshman season, she was seventh in the County (20:58.7).

They just kept pushing me, kept that positive attitude and atmosphere around me and really convinced me that if I worked at this, I could be good, Venuto said.Thanks to them I was able to see that with my own eyes then after a few years and say maybe this is where I belong.

As her freshman year came to a close, she was a runner cross country and track with a relatively benign schedule.

Then, she gotfesed.Thats a term unique to the Southeast Local School District but not unique to Venuto.Its how so many Pirates athletes have ended up in Dynamic Dribblers or golf or track and field over the years.Fesemyer is no tough-talking drill sergeant but somehow, in her very sweet way, she is impossible to say no to.

And Fesemyer wanted Venuto to come out for golf.

Honestly, when you get around a kid that you just really love their work ethic, love everything about them, you want to be around them, Fesemyer said.So it was like, Gia, why dont you come to golf, because shes just that kind of kid. Shes the kind of kid that you want to keep around.

Fesemyer cornered Venuto at an ice cream shop in Lake Milton after track and field practice and when the then-freshman confessed she missed playing golf with her dad, it was over.

That idea (of golfing) just slipped into my mind, Venuto said. I didnt do much about it. Well, when an idea like that slips into Coach Fesemyers mind, she doesnt just take it and forget about it. She takes it and runs with it, so after that day, I was getting calendars for golf practices and she was setting me up with private lessons with the golf pro at Olde Dutch (Mill Golf Course), all kinds of stuff, and I was like, Whoa, what have I gotten myself into.

But Fesemyer was right.The wily coach saw something in the freshman that Venuto herself didnt realize yet.

Every time you go out to Olde Dutch Mill, chances are youre going to see Gia, Fesemyer said. Even if we had a match that she didnt play well, shed go right back to the course. Thats what she did.

That work ethic and attitude lifted her from a 52 average as a sophomore to a 49.8 as a junior to a 48.1 as a senior.

That same fight carried into cross country, especially this season, as she rose from 25th (22:34.07) at last years Super Duals to 10th (22:00.32) at this years event. She also recorded her highest finish in the County snagging third.

Shes not a natural runner, Southeast coach Julia Dillon said.She isnt, but what she has above a lot of other people is she has heart and self-motivation and, I think in the sport of cross country, thats exactly what you have to have in order to be good.

In addition to cross country and golf, Venuto also is a water girl for the football team on Friday nights and takes photos for the yearbook. In the early fall, when cross country and golf are in season, she found herself driving to school with two sets of clothes one for cross, one for golf.

Honestly, I love staying busy, Venuto said. You can ask anybody. Im just such a busy person and I just love it. I love being involved in anything I can. All my teachers and coaches, they always say, I dont know how you do it, but like honestly, I dont know how I couldnt do it.

There are downsides.

She frequently had to get her mileage after golf, long after her cross country teammates had gone home.

Cross country is a hard sport, period. Its especially tricky training alone, but she kept taking those sunset runs, sometimes accompanied by Dillon or Fesemyer.

But Venuto is not one to quit.That was apparent before Dillon took over the team when Venuto was a freshman at the district meet slip-sliding her way out of regional contention.

I remember I was in my second mile, I was jogging, Im in like 26th and Im jogging, Venuto said.Im just dropping places and Im like, Oh my gosh, what am I doing? Youre going to be done. You have to move now, and in my mind, I just remember thinking, You cant be done. Youve come too far to just be done now.

And that was apparent at Saturdays district meet, when she started slow but ended up qualifying by a wide margin.

Gia, at this point, is such a seasoned runner and she has such heart and determination that I just know shes going to give it everything she has and she can kick it in when she needs to, Dillon said. Thats exactly what she did (Saturday) to make sure she was coming in not even close to being 20th.

In a sport where runners rise and fall for any number of reasons mental and physical Venuto has been steady in the saddle.

When you get out there, its just you and yourself against everyone else, Dillon said. You have to be able to push through, even when youre hurting, even when youre sick, even when you want to quit, that you dont (quit), and she has that. She has that quality that sets her apart from other runners.

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ATHLETE OF THE WEEK | With dogged determination, Gia Venuto rises toward the top of two sports - Record-Courier

You can make sure your phone is in airplane mode when you drive, never snack when youre behind the wheel, always have both hands on the wheel, and yet still be a distracted driver.

Keeping your head in the game is the greatest challenge professional drivers face when it comes to keeping ourselves and everyone around us safe from harm. Its a delusion to believe we can focus solely on the task of driving when behind the wheel, or that the solution to this challenge is mandated rest.

I firmly believe that road safety starts with the right attitude in your head. For example, you shouldnt be driving if youre filled with any destructive emotion such as anxiety, anger, or depression. The same applies if you are experiencing fatigue, burn-out, or exhaustion.

But is that even possible in the world that commercial drivers move in? How many of you professional drivers reading this have made it through a week without experiencing at least one of the physical or emotional factors I alluded to? And what do you do, if anything, about it?

Im pretty sure that every dispatch office as well as every shipping and receiving office has experienced the angry, irate, or emotionally-charged truck driver. Very often, we drivers are a pressure cooker filled with nuggets of emotion stewing in a broth of fatigue. Woe betide the dispatcher or shipping clerk that pops open the lid without backing off the pressure first.

Having a fellow driver you can call and just shoot the breeze with when anxiety and fatigue start to take hold is important. Im no psychologist, but I know that talking to someone who shares your same experience and background in the industry is a fantastic way to change the channel in your head.

Often, that is all that you need to dissipate the anger or frustration you are feeling. Its a simple way of releasing that pressure youre experiencing. In the two decades that Ive been trucking, I have never sat in a safety meeting that has discussed the everyday emotional challenges that drivers especially longhaul drivers face with any great depth.

The closest to this topic we ever seem to get is when employee benefits are discussed and employee assistance programs are on the agenda.

But what about fatigue, weariness, exhaustion, and burn-out? Well, to be honest, those are things we only talk about in terms of hours-of-service regulations and drivers know those rules are not a magic elixir to eliminate fatigue.

So, in my opinion, distracted driving results from the debilitating emotional and physical responses we experience as a result of the work we do. You get emotionally charged, or fatigued, or both, and your mind wanders off to deal with those issues. Your head is no longer in the game. You are now experiencing a much higher level of risk and you probably arent aware of it.

Eighty per cent of ongoing driver training (if you get any training, that is) should be learning about how to keep your head in the game and how to recognize the emotional and physical factors within yourself that put you at an increased level of risk. I think this is the most important step towards improving the dismal safety record within our industry.

Im raising this topic because for the last several months, I have been feeling a heightened level of anxiety and burn-out. As a result, I have become hypersensitive to requests from the folks in operations that place any additional demand on my time, even if those requests are reasonable and not at all unusual, which is the majority of the time.

I have a high degree of respect for the people I work with. Ive worked with many of them for more than 16 years now, so the last thing I want to do is act like a jerk and be disrespectful or unreasonable.

How our mental well-being affects our personal safety and the safety of others on the job, is a huge topic. I think workplace safety in the trucking industry deserves a drivers point of view from the front lines.

Hopefully I can bring you some of that perspective over the next several months with a break here and there for any hot topics that grab my attention. Be aware and be safe out there drivers.

Al Goodhall has been a professional longhaul driver since 1998. He shares his experiences via his blog at http://www.truckingacross canada.blogspot.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @Al_Goodhall

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The Last Word: Keeping our head in the game - Truck News

The belief that we live in a meritocracy is one of our oldest and most persistent illusions.

It justifies the gaping inequalities in our society by attributing them to the skill and hard work of successful people and the incompetence and shortcomings of unsuccessful people. But this has always been a fantasy, a way of glossing over how the world actually works.

A new book by Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap, is a fascinating attempt to poke holes in our conventional understanding of meritocracy and, in the process, make the case for something better.

We typically think of meritocracy as a system that rewards the best and brightest. For Markovits, it is merely a pretense, constructed to rationalize an unjust distribution of advantage.

Heres a clarifying stat: At two Ivy League schools that Markovits surveyed, the share of students from households in the top quintile of the income distribution exceeds the share from the bottom two quintiles combined by a ratio of about three and a half to one. The point: Meritocracy is a mechanism for transferring wealth from one generation to the next. Call that what you want, but you cant call it fair or impartial.

What makes Markovitss book so interesting is that he doesnt just condemn meritocracy as unfair for non-elites; he argues that its actually bad for the people benefiting from it. The trap of meritocracy ensnares all of us, he says, in ways that make life less satisfying for everyone.

I spoke to Markovits about how meritocracy works, what its doing to us, and what a post-meritocratic society might look like. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

What is a meritocracy, and do we actually live in one?

Meritocracy is the idea that people get ahead based on their own accomplishments rather than, for example, on their parents social class. And the moral intuition behind meritocracy is that it creates an elite that is capable and effective and that it gives everybody a fair chance at success.

Do we live in a meritocracy? Well, maybe the best we can hope for is to live in an imperfect meritocracy. The problem, of course, is that elites cheat and they game the system and they engage in all kinds of self-dealing in order to get ahead.

On a purely descriptive level, though, I think we do live in something like a meritocracy. That is to say, the bulk of the reason why certain people have gotten ahead is that they have genuinely accomplished things. On the other hand, the moral intuition behind meritocracy is not at all realized. This system does not give everybody a fair chance at success and it hasnt been particularly good for society as a whole. And it hasnt even been good for the elite.

Well get to that last point, but first I want to be very precise about the claim youre making here. Theres a simple critique of meritocracy that says the so-called elites arent really elite; instead, theyre beneficiaries of a rigged system.

I dont think you dispute this, but you make a deeper claim, which is that the problem is the kind of society weve built, a society that favors the sort of skills meritocrats are uniquely equipped to have. Can you say a bit about that?

Lets just separate those two things out. And maybe the recent college admission scandal is a good way to illustrate this concretely. In that scandal, some rich and famous people paid bribes to get their kids into college.

Now, Im not saying the scandal wasnt wrong it absolutely was scandalous. But the bulk of the reason why our colleges, particularly our elite colleges, are filled with kids of rich parents isnt that. Instead, its that rich parents spend enormous sums of money not on bribing anybody but on educating their children, on getting their children into prestigious kindergartens and high schools, on coaches and tutors and music teachers, and this means the children of rich people simply do better on the merits.

And so the big problem that we face isnt merely that the rich cheat, its that the meritocracy favors the rich even when everybody plays by the rules.

So youre saying that a world in which meritocracy works is, by definition, a bad world, a world that engineers and reproduces inequalities.

Yes, it exacerbates and reproduces inequalities, so that one thing thats happened is that because the rich can afford to educate their children in a way nobody else can, when it comes time to evaluate people on the merits, rich kids just do better.

Is the meritocratic system itself the greatest impediment to a fair society, which is to say a society in which equality of opportunity is a real thing?

I wouldnt want to argue about whether meritocracy or racism, for example, is the greatest impediment to equality of opportunity.

But Ill say this: the SAT and the College Board reported data in 2016 from which you can figure out how many kids there were that year in the US who took SAT who scored 750 or above, which is roughly the Ivy League median, and whose parents had a graduate degree. And the answer is about 15,000.

You can also figure out how many kids there were who scored 750 or above whose parents had not graduated high school, much less earned graduate degrees. And the numbers are so small, the tail is so thin, that the statistical techniques become unreliable. But if you just grind out the math, the answer, I think, was 32.

So thats a case in which effectively what degrees your parents have determines whether youre going to get a high-enough SAT score to get into the Ivy League. And thats meritocratic in a way but its an incredible block to equality of opportunity.

Is there any way to organize a competitive society that doesnt inevitably tend toward these sorts of excesses?

I think its possible, yes. So one distinction I draw is between excellent education and superior education. Excellent education is education that makes a person good at something thats worth doing, and superior education is education that makes somebody better than other people at something, regardless of whether its worth doing or not.

You can imagine a society which has widespread, excellent education and invests in training people to be good at all the tasks that the society needs and fills up its jobs with people who are excellent at them. And that would be a kind of a meritocratic society that structures its education and work so that once youre excellent, being a little bit better doesnt make that much of a difference.

Germany, I think, is a pretty good model for that kind of society. But our society focuses on superior education: It gives huge advantages to people who are better than somebody else or than everybody else in all sorts of things that probably arent worth doing, like being great at high-tech finance, which most economists think has almost no social value.

But if youre really good at it you can make millions and millions of dollars a year, and to get really good at it you have to master all sorts of difficult skills and you have to get degrees at the top of your class in the very best universities in the country. And thats the kind of system that we have now.

I want to circle back to something you alluded to earlier, which is that meritocracy is toxic even for those who profit from it. That will strike many readers as counterintuitive. Can you explain what you mean?

It takes enormous effort to win and keep winning in this competition, so elite schooling has become enormously more intensive than it was 20 or 50 years ago. And elite jobs have become enormously more intensive. The toll that this takes is quite heavy and I think its destructive of human well-being.

Meritocrats are constantly struggling and being evaluated and tested, and they constantly have to shape and manipulate themselves in order to pass the test. And in a way, its like theyre portfolio managers whose assets include just themselves, and they have kind of an instrumental and alienated attitude toward their own lives because they have to treat their life that way.

You teach at Yale Law. Youre surrounded by elites. Do you find that most or any of them feel like theyre suffering on account of their privilege? Because my sense is that the people with the most to lose from reordering society are usually the most committed to keeping the world the world the way it is. The idea that weary meritocrats will suddenly wake up and find solidarity with the besieged middle class seems a little quixotic to me.

Its nuts, right? I can just give you some of my own anecdotes. There was a survey of the mental health climate at Yale Law School done last year or the year before, and something like 70 percent of respondents said that they felt the need to use and consult mental health services. And there are similar data from other elite institutions that show elite students are not happy, are not doing well.

Twenty years ago when I started teaching here, my students were feeling very good about themselves. They felt like they won the golden ticket. Today, thats just not the case. They feel as though theyve run a gauntlet to get here, and they recognize that when they get out to the workforce, theyre just going to have to run another gauntlet thats just like the one they ran. And they dont want that.

And they also increasingly recognize that their advantages are very closely intertwined with the exclusion of others, and they object to that morally. So I dont think that at the moment this is a student body that is thriving. Its got great career prospects, but the rest of its life as a whole is not going well and I think my students recognize that.

And what is the price that non-elites are paying for the system? How are those marginalized by meritocracy suffering?

I think there are at least three kinds of prices. First, they cant compete and their children cant compete. What a poor or middle-class family is able to spend on education is absolutely dwarfed by what a wealthy family is able to spend.

A second harm is what elites have done to the labor market. Theyve remade jobs in a way that destroys the middle class by eliminating the high-paying positions for people who lack technocratic expertise. Think of a company like Kodak, which, at its peak, employed 140,000 people with good, secure jobs. Now that part of the economy is occupied by a company like Instagram, which had 13 employees when it was bought for a $1 billion by Facebook and those were all super-skilled elite workers.

And then finally meritocracy adds a kind of a moral insult to this economic exclusion because it frames what is in fact structural inequality and structural exclusion as an individual failure to measure up, and then tells you if youre in the middle class, the reason you cant get the great high-paying job is because youre not good enough and the reason that your kids cant get into Harvard is that theyre not good enough, which is complete nonsense. But thats what the ideology tells you.

I take all your points and dont disagree, I just wonder what it would take to move beyond the meritocratic model. Are we not, after all, talking about a complete shift in how we think about political economy and morality?

I think thats probably right. Look, one way to think about this is that if you take a longer historical view, meritocracy in its deeper origins came to the English-speaking world around 1833, which is the date in which the administrative division of the British East India Company entrance and promotion based on social class was replaced with entrance and promotion based on competitive examinations.

And so it took from 1833 to 1980 or so, 150 years, for the whole society and economy to be remade on this model. And that involved changes in institutions, in technology, in government, in policy. And it will take generations and imaginative changes to undo this thing or to get into the next phase of our collective existence.

So I know it sounds like Im asking for something unobtainable, but the reality is that the current setup is increasingly unsustainable. There are going to be fundamental shifts in how we think about our ambitions, our lives, our institutions, and our production and consumption. And the trick in the face of that is to come up with a compelling critique of where we are and charismatic ideas of where we might go.

The sort of change youre after will, for lack of a better word, demand a revolution of individual consciousness. Ultimately, people are going to have to want different things, fear different things, aspire to different things.

People have to realize that the things that they want right now are not making them well. They have to recognize the sources of their dissatisfaction and the sources of their childrens dissatisfaction and then they have to start finding alternatives.

And the job of policymakers is to try to create alternatives that will serve the needs of those who grab onto them. Thats why, for example, one of the policy recommendations in the book is to massively expand enrollments in elite education. The trick is to get many, many more kids from non-rich families into not just the Ivy League, but elite private universities, elite private high schools, and elite private elementary schools, and to do it in a way that does not require excluding any currently rich kids, so that the schools themselves become genuine avenues of opportunity again.

Ill close with a somewhat ominous question: If we dont unravel the meritocracy, if society continues to hum along as it is, if the inequalities persist, what will happen?

I dont have a confident view about the particulars, but we know that societies that succumb to this level of concentrated wealth and privilege generally dont unwind it except through losing a foreign war or an internal revolution. And something like that is in the offing for us. I dont know when or how or what the details are, but thats the kind of fear that one should take very, very seriously.

More:
Meritocracy harms everyone even the winners - Vox.com