an interesting study

HERE’S A STUDY saying that loneliness, happiness, etc., tend to spread contagiously in groups even to several degrees of distance, mostly through the spread of behaviors associated with these states.

This affirms my view that you have to try to help make the people around you as happy as possible, but also that if at a certain point you realize that someone really wants to suck energy out of others, you have to be ruthless and cut the cord and cease contact. It is so easy to get the disease.

The point I’m always most concerned with is productivity. There are people getting things done, and there are people going on about how unimpressed they are with everyone who is getting things done, and simultaneously making excuses for their own delays. You can’t associate with the latter group of people or you’re going to end up just like them. Instead, if for example you’re writing a dissertation, then you need to associate with people who are actually making progress on theirs, not with those who “had a fight with their professor,” or whatever the excuse was for falling behind by a few years.

As mentioned several time on this blog in the past, I always knew I wanted to write philosophy books, and so I slowly learned to copy all the work behaviors of the two people I knew who were the most effective in reaching that goal: Lingis and Latour. Though these two could hardly be more different as people, part of what makes them the two most impressive mentors I’ve had is the supreme healthiness of their relationship to their work. They simply do it, they enjoy it, and they pursue it with enough efficiency that they both have plenty of time left over in the day for other things. (Latour tends to run a tighter schedule and end meetings after a time in order to fulfill that schedule. By contrast Lingis tends to let conversations go on for hours into the night, since he owns the early morning hours and can always get his day’s work done before you wake up and want to talk again. Then again, Latour is married and needs to make time for his family, whereas the cosmos as a whole is Lingis’s family, which explains much of the difference in their style of time management. The point is, both are highly effective at what they do.)

Similar advice is given to new faculty here in Cairo. A certain percentage of foreign faculty adore living here, and a certain percentage never stop griping and whining about Cairo’s traffic, dirtiness, inconvenience, etc. We are advised, properly, not to spend much time with the latter group, since they will simply drag us down. Instead, you have to spend time with the people who love Egypt.

And another message to graduate students… You really have to avoid the small number of professors who are simply bad people. It’s never any mystery who they are. Your fellow older graduate students in any given program always know exactly who they are, and given that graduate students are among the sharpest and most avid gossips on the planet, they can even give you all the gory details of various (inevitably true) stories about why those professors are bad people. Believe those stories. While grad students can be viciously blunt in their tales, they are rarely slanderers, since they are always quick to praise those professors who have helped them.

Do not choose as your advisor a psychological tyrant because you think he/she is a professional star whose reference letter will be good for you on the market, or whatever. It isn’t worth it. Choose as an advisor someone you respect as a human being: a psychologically clean specimen who isn’t going to either ruin your self-confidence or (if you’re female) hit on you constantly in subtle or unsubtle ways.

It would also follow from the aforementioned study that unhappy behaviors can spread through the blogosphere, and so it is probably a good option simply to ignore and not even to read the crabby, embittered energy suckers. Read those who are moving somewhere.