List,

  One of the things I am going to be proposing is to explore ways to be part of the Digital Identity Solution. What does that mean? It will refer to how folks are living their lives and make adjustments that foster incremental movements, no matter how small, toward being and doing things that help. So, this might involve fostering connection or kindness (to combat isolation and disconnection), learning about how to make meaning or new ways of understanding the world for your self or sharing with others, taking steps to take care of the environment or reduce political polarization or exploring ways to understand or interact wisely with the digital landscape.

 

  So, along those lines, let me share two things. The is a simple graph that drives home the youth mental health crisis. More than anything else, anxiety and depression ranks as the number one “major problem”.

 

Now, to put this in the context of the Digital Identity Problem, let’s juxtapose this with the following quote from Steve Iliardi’s The Depression Cure:

Modern-day hunter-gatherer bands—such as the Kaluli people of the New Guinea highlands—have been assessed by Western researchers for the presence of mental illness. Remarkably, clinical depression is almost completely nonexistent among such groups, whose way of life is similar to that of our remote ancestors. Despite living very hard lives—with none of the material comforts or medical advances we take for granted—they’re largely immune to the plague of depressive illness that we see ruining lives all around us. In perhaps the most telling  example, anthropologist Edward Schieffelin lived among the Kaluli for nearly a decade and carefully interviewed over two thousand men, women, and children regarding their experience of grief  and  depression; he found only one person who came close to meeting our full diagnostic criteria for depressive illness.

 

The second thing I would like to share is the idea that people are aching for meaningful ways of being and connecting and “doing good”. We just need to figure out ways of “tapping” that power. Here is an interesting story about a professor who, sort of unintentionally, “released” a wave of kindness…https://www.chronicle.com/article/For-One-Professor-How-a/247030.

 

It would be interesting to start conversations about ways folks are finding that are part of the Digital Identity Solution.

Best,
G