As someone clearly camped on the introverted side of the personality spectrum, I’m always down with “the world doesn’t understand us introverts” discussion. Susan Cain provides an 18-minute fix in this 2012 TED Talk.

Cain makes a couple interesting points about society:

• There was a notable cultural shift toward extroversion during the 20th century
• Our institutions (schools, workplaces, churches, etc.) tend to be designed to create an atmosphere which extroverts thrive in

Cain concludes with the following call to action:

• Stop requiring constant group work
• Everyone should go to “the wilderness”–i.e., unplug from the world and for some introspective time
• Everyone–introverts in particular–needs to occasionally open up and share with the world their energy, passion, and joy

We need to have a national conversation on introversion.

From the 1940s through the early 1970s, a company called Cornet Films produced instructional films primarily intended for teenaged audiences.

This 1950 example (via Mental Floss) addresses the question: How can you tell if you’re in love?

The video is an entertaining watch, primarily due to its quaint plot, dialogue, and mannerisms.  When was the last time you saw teenage guys dressed up in suits to eat in a restaurant?

But once you get past the ’50ishness of it, the film does offer a more timeless message–on love.  It touches on several types of attraction, then tasks viewers to ask the following questions to determine if they’re in “mature” love:

• Are we really interested in the same things?
• Do we feel at ease together?
• Are we proud of each other?
• Do we agree on the basic things (religion, marriage, children, money)?

This self-examination may seem crudely simple, but how many couples–even those in their 20s and 30s–gloss right over it when they get caught up in the emotion of romance?  More than a few.

How Do You Know It’s Love? reminds us that while some things change over the years, others don’t.

I generally like Google.  It’s my go-to search engine, and I use several of its products: Drive, Voice, Maps, even G+ (though that’s been largely dormant).

By and large I don’t have issues with Google’s policies.  I think it tries to live up to its unofficial motto:

The Google Code of Conduct is one of the ways we put “Don’t be evil” into practice. It’s built around the recognition that everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct.

But today Reddit revealed a disturbing fact about Google–its Dog Policy (emphasis added):

Google’s affection for our canine friends is an integral facet of our corporate culture. We like cats, but we’re a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our offices would be fairly stressed out.

As a decidedly cat person, this bothers me.  Not enough to switch to Bing, but I’ll never view Google quite as favorably again.

Alas.

Psychologist Dan Gilbert, who you may recognize from retirement commercials, gives a short (6:40) but interesting TED Talk on the end-of-history illusion.

Essentially, people underestimate how much they will change in the future.  While it’s true that our rate of change slows as we age, this phenomenon (anticipating that we will change less in the next decade than we actually do) holds true for all ages.  It’s true for our values, personalities, and even our tastes (likes and dislikes).

Why is this so?  Probably two reasons:

• At any point in life we think we’ve “arrived” in our development
• It’s much easier to see how we’ve changed in hindsight than it is to imagine how we’ll be in the future.

As Gilbert puts it in concluding:

The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. It’s as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. It’s a watershed on the timeline. It’s the moment at which we finally become ourselves. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our life is change.

So here’s to change . . . and growth.

Yesterday I was bicycling through the wilds of Roane County, ambling up this ridge, when I spotted an object in the road ahead.  At first I thought it was a leaf, but as I approached I saw that it was slowly moving, not blowing across the lane, on legs.

I had happened across a very young bird (unknown species) who was not long removed from the nest.  Its wings weren’t developed enough for it to fly, and it was walking/hopping in a directionless lost manner on the road.  It  barely moved when I rolled up to it on my bike, indicating that it was not yet aware of its surroundings.

Although the traffic on this road is not heavy (there was no vehicles in sight when I stopped) I knew that the outlook for this chick was not good if I left it there.  A few minutes on the road would be enough to do it in.

So I stopped the bike to “rescue” it.  The only problem is that I am not a good animal handler.  At all.  I have difficulty holding and treating my cat, when necessary.  Here we’re dealing with a wild animal.

I was able to grab the chick easily enough–as I said, it seemed stunned.  But issues arose when I picked it up.  I didn’t want to squeeze it too hard and harm it, so I grasped it loosely.  Sudden it started fluttering and escaped my grasp, flopping to the ground near the center lines.

I felt exposed standing in the road, holding my bike while trying to corral this bird.  At any time a pickup truck could come barreling around the corner, creating an incident.

No time to dally, I caught the chick again.  I held it more firmly this time, but started to feel insecure again when it began wiggling.  So I quickly took a couple steps toward the edge of the road and tossed it into the vegetation several feet away.

My pitch would not have won me a spot as a zookeeper, but I suspect the bird survived the involuntary flight intact.  Definitely less traumatic than falling from a nest.

My “rescue” came none too soon; a few seconds later a couple pickup trucks rounded the turn below and zoomed by.  The first one barely allowed me any space as it passed.  Suffice it to say the bird wouldn’t have been offered any.

Did I save the chick?  We’ll never know.  I’d like to think I made a difference.  But frankly, in that state, mired in vegetation, the odds of its survival didn’t seem good.  I heard chirping nearby–possibly the mother?  If so, perhaps she would help it.  Otherwise, who knows.

I do know what its fate would have been if it remained on the road.