Nurses as a sign of how well the actual economy is doing
I have a suspicion and have read some things I need to check up on, along the lines that how well nurses are doing is important. It is a pretty normal job, with a moderate education needed to do it, and a lot of people like the job and do it for a long time and want to do it for a long time. They don’t become nurses in order to become doctors later, and don’t really have plans to do a side hustle or another profession. It is just the thing that they are. It is a job that the general population needs people to do, and needs people to want to do. Therefore it is a good sensor for how people who are doing normal useful things are doing, and how they are being treated. You may remember that an enormous number of nurses left the profession according to surveys after 2020, something like 20% of them. I think that policy angles around “how to make life nice for nurses” ends up translating to generally how to make life nice for people, and that when life gets bad enough for nurses that they are burned out or simply do not want to do it anymore that they will bail.
How memes and extreme samples bias problem solving ability, and antidotes
A lot of people would have met one extreme person or have had one extreme work experience and this becomes a locked data point around which other data points are collected, whereas many things can actually be a lot easier, or with a lot fewer drastic consequences, than the situation you are thinking about that is centering you on that subject or experience.
There are antidotes, but they can be pretty funny. I find that reading Milan Kundera, the Czech author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, can be uniquely helpful, but reading him may have some prerequisites for it to be helpful in this way.
Perhaps a basic idea is to understand and write and tell yourself about the grand story arcs, and grand romances, that are perhaps not your main romances or story arcs, but that if pulled out and written about in a novel could actually be its own story arc in itself. this way you actually play with the positioning of the big things in your life compared to other big things in your life, rather than just setting them as “lower priority,” leaving it at that, and letting those “lower priority” story arcs govern the lower priority aspects of your life — which can still be a majority of things in your life.
An actually actionable women’s issues platform
I very much want to write this and perhaps just make this its own website. I think that America being the wealthy country it is having accidental and preventable maternity deaths is horrible. Generally protocols and the factory model of childbirth and increasingly so all of medicine is abysmal. I actually thing a lot of questions around AI safety in terms of when does human judgment need to be in the picture, and actually enforced a bit, versus things flowing automatically, translate well into a hospital setting. Almost everybody I know knows somebody who died or almost died due to some medical error situation.