A Blogged Life

“Everyone takes pause at 40. It’s the age you have to assess everything in your life. It’s the fictitious marker that’s always coming up when you’re young,” he says. “The world really does look at you to kind of have it together by 40, and be successful by 40. Whatever success means. If you’re still really kind of a mess when you’re 40, then it’s, ‘Woo, boy, that’s a loser. That guy’s a loser.’”

You’ll go through this, because I went through this in my early 40s, which is you start getting really obsessed with age. You start to feel really old, and you start doing this math: ‘How long do I have for this, and how long do I have for to hit this age?’ You start to feel super old. And then weirdly it will pass, once you kind of go, ‘I can’t do anything about it. It’s happening.’ Do this, because this is always a nice salve: Look back on the first time you thought you were old and it was over, and it was probably some time in your mid-30s, and you’ll go, ‘Well s—, I’m 40 now, and what an a–hole I was for thinking that back then, because look how young I was then!’”

[F]ew tips on staring down the intimidating milestone:

1. Do away with childish things.

2. Realize that being a proper adult is a hard-fought reward.

3. If you haven’t done it, do it now.

4. Always have older friends.

cbsnews.com

Employ­ers must set and enforce rules for sex­u­al rela­tion­ships at the office

A study on the taxi market in Lima, Peru examines price differences between men and women. Taxi prices in Lima are set by bargaining, and the market of sellers is extremely competitive. The authors initially found, surprisingly, that “men face higher initial prices and rejection rates.”

Passengers in this study begin by rejecting a first taxi to send a signal of low valuation to a second (waiting) taxi which they then negotiate with. Despite passengers otherwise using an identical bargaining script, we find that negotiated outcomes at the second taxi are gender blind. The second taxi treats men and women the same.

Also important, especially for parents and teachers, is the fact that this study demonstrates that the same response—namely, disinterest or boredom—-may result from two different, entirely opposite mechanisms. Children are likely to become disinterested if the learning material is either too simple, because the material is either already known or may be picked up and understood quickly; however, they’ll also show that same response of disinterest if the material is overly complex, likely because such material is just too overwhelming.