If therapy were a stock, It’d be ticking up right now. You can’t escape the myriad of mental health posts and hashtags on the internet. Everybody is talking about how to take better care of them- and yourselves. The ubiquity of mental health in social media has contributed to lifting the stigma to a large extent. Ay man, I didn’t really measure this “large extent,” I took the shortcut. But I think it’s a fair assertion to make. It’s not like how it used to be when enduring depressive episodes or positive diagnoses for bipolar disorder or ADHD meant “crazy person.”
Present day casual conversation is primed to be sprinkled with deep dives into narcissism and burnout. I have half a mind to bet my life savings that your favourite YouTuber has given you an account of their own brushes with depression. This openness about grim and deeply personal experiences consoles an audience. It contributes to engendering positive feelings in others. You are reminded that you’re not alone. It’s easy to see how such a thing would catch on. The mental health audience is consequently growing… fast! You know what comes next. If you’re receiving a service for free then you’re probably the product. The risk of therapy becoming content led by influencers rather than medical professionals is now fully realised.
The limitations thereof are obvious. Therapy is better conducted in a controlled environment. It’s a back-and-forth between a professional and a patient where the professional brings out the patient’s unconscious feelings into the conscious. The feelings are usually dark, dreadful and chaotic. When the patient gets that taste of dark, dreadful and chaotic in their conscious mind it could make for an emotional response. The expert therapist seeks to make the patient aware of their negative behaviours and feelings and when possible, point out where they stem from in the hope that this awareness will drive better behaviours. On social media, the discussions are necessarily broad. Influencers have to reach the widest audience possible. They don’t have the platform to address anything too specifically. They are also not in control of the environment whence their audience consumes their content. Additionally, there are some legalities and ethical question marks in providing medical information so specific so as to violate a patient’s confidentiality.
Influencers have to speak relatively vaguely. The more vague their rhetoric, the more worthless. Broad statements can suffer from the Barnum effect, where they are so vague that they appear valid for all situations. This is the definition of meaninglessness. Mental health content creators then take on more the appearance of horoscope writers rather than scientists. Your influencer of choice may misdiagnose the audience with a serious mental health condition just for identifying with symptoms like “fatigue” and “anxiety,” which can really apply to a host of health conditions.
Your medical needs should be met by a licensed medical professional. It’s not easy to find a good therapist in my country and it’s certainly not cheap. This probably helps the course of the self-inducted therapist online. There’s nothing inherently wrong with providing fact-based help via social media. Sometimes though, these influencers are only having certain conversations to promote products. Products that have no relationship whatsoever with mental health. They are conflicted between helping their audience and getting paid. They inadvertently end up leading their followers through the valley of death towards extreme dieting and other equally damaging behaviour.
The Peter Principle
Dr. Lawrence L. Peter describes how he came to the fascinating idea that has been popularised as The Peter Principle in this video here. The Principle, which he named after himself, is his observation that there is a tendency in organisational hierarchies for employees to rise, through promotion, to their respective levels of incompetence.
Lawrence says he has encountered highly competent mechanics who are rewarded for the same competence by being promoted to more senior roles within the service shop. The senior roles generally involve them performing tasks like making strategic decisions and/or being in charge of other mechanics, tasks that were not previously in their job description. The skills required to be a good mechanic are different to those required to be a good manager. Lawrence says he witnessed many people competent in one area, being promoted to new areas in which they found themselves completely incompetent. After reaching this level, that’s where they tended to stay until their career came to an end. He summarises this as, “People rise to their level of incompetence.” He insists that he only said that tongue-in-cheek but I think there’s something here.
If you’ve been living on earth for more than 20 years you have asked yourself a version of the question, “how on earth did this person become the boss?” The Peter Principle perhaps presents a path to the solution. Perhaps the people we regard as incompetent were once competent at a role of lower consequence.
Michael Scott exemplifies this idea quite perfectly. He is the Scranton branch manager for a fictional paper company called Dunder Mifflin. You can learn all about this special company in episodes of a show called The Office US. For those familiar with Michael, the point is made. He is the worst boss you’ll ever see. It’s not because he’s a Cruella-type or whatever. He is actually very sweet. He is just totally out of his depth when it comes to managing people. He makes inappropriate jokes about women, race and every controversial issue in between. If this show came out in the current PC climate, it wouldn’t have made it past the pilot episode.
An example of Michael’s ineptitude is when his branch faces closure due to the threat of bankruptcy at the hands of a wasteful leadership. He gets his staff to role play a murder mystery all day instead of catching up on sales. If that’s not convincing for you. Here’s more. He plays parkour in the office. He is constantly making over the top promises that he cannot keep. We can’t forget his golden ticket blunder. He doesn’t understand his branch’s finances. This very Michael Scott, once upon a time, was the firm’s salesperson of the year 2 years running.
A meritocratic organisation has to reward its top employees somehow. Promotions and raises are traditional incentives. A lot of people actually work towards these. Be warned though. The most skilled, technically gifted member of staff may make for a poor supervisor. Take cognisance of the skills that people possess and determine if those skills are sufficient for any new role you have prepared for them. Promotion for the sake of promotion is not going to do your business any favours.
PS. I strongly recommend that you watch The Office US.
Elon Musk Wants the Whole Cake
Elon Musk became Twitter’s largest shareholder after he acquired a stake worth just over 9% in the company. He was to be surpassed by a Mutual Fund only a few days later but that’s beside the point. Musk was then offered a board seat which he promptly rejected, and instead made an offer to buy the entire establishment in a way that only he can, valuing each share at $54,20. The suffix, 420 is a little joke by him and his team as this is a colloquialism for marijuana.
Now that he has brought it up, it’s almost the only thing that makes sense here. Maybe marijuana is involved in some capacity to evoke some of these bright ideas from the richest man in the world. Elon says he wants to take Twitter private so that it can be transformed into a platform that fosters free speech. This logic appears to be in conflict with democratic tenets. He wants to make Twitter more democratic by consolidating its ownership. That’s like saying you want to make a cake sweeter by taking out the sugar. Instead of having a diverse shareholder base to make Twitter’s decisions, he is proposing that all of that responsibility be consolidated to him. He touts himself as the people’s hero and perhaps he truly believes that he could achieve a democratic platform by turning its ownership autocratic. I just can’t believe it.
Twitter is the best, worst run company in the world. Jack Dorsey, a co-founder, owns as much as 2% of the company he started. The Twitter board own less than 2 and half percent on aggregate. Enter the principal-agent problem well discussed in Business and Economics classrooms al over the world. A principal is an owner or the person who is the most invested in a certain undertaking. The agent is anyone in the employ of the principal. A problem arises when the principal’s incentives are not aligned with the incentives of the agent. The principal wants to maximise profits and an agent just wants to get paid. Maximising profits might mean going the extra mile for clients. The agent just wants to show up at work and do the bare minimum. To address this conundrum, business owners offer their executives a piece of their company via stock options in an effort to harmonise the interests of the shareholders with the interests of the agents.
Incongruous incentives between a principal and an agent lead to a cocktail of poor decision-making, poor execution and outright sabotage in the extreme. Now, let’s reiterate that Twitter’s controlling mind owns only 2.4% of Twitter. The agents couldn’t care less about what happened to Twitter, and if you look at the past 10 years, it clearly shows.
What I’m Reading
So… Dantes is a psychopath. He invited a bunch of people to his house for dinner to torment them. There’s no other way to put it. He got his hands on a secret involving Mrs Danglars (who is married to the jealous shipmate) and Villefort (shady prosecutor). They had something of an affair that resulted in baby. The baby died at birth (or so they thought), and was buried in a backyard. It turns out the backyard in question is the dinner venue. Dantes bought a house where a parent’s worst nightmare once took place and organised an event to bring back those parents to the scene where they lost their baby. Worse yet, these parents are not married to each other. They each brought their respective significant others to this dinner. Dantes is just watching all of this in amusement. He is losing me this guy. He has become the villain in my eyes. Sure. I get it. People sent you to jail over nothing. But for real, what do the wives have to do with it?
This is not even the only hell he has raised in House Danglars. Dantes has been sending fake stock market signals to Danglars, a banker renowned for his speculative habits. All the decisions he has made based on Dantes’ information have resulted in heavy losses. He is unable to explain how his luck that had always been so good turn so bad so quickly. And the sadistic Dantes show rolls on.
Changing the focus to Fernand (Mr. steal-your-girl), we find out that after he plotted to have Dantes incarcerated, he found it within himself to betray yet another person. This time a king no less. He served under a king and had him killed. Judas yute! Vele vele you are what you are. People are more honest with their actions than their words.
It’s weird also to read stuff that was written ages ago. So much was different about those times. They have slaves in this one and its normal. Nobody bats an eye. Every now and again someone talks about how they bought a slave in one place to sell in another. It’s a jarring concept to consider in the 21st century. Alas, those days are almost gone.
If anything else happened this week, I missed it. Till next Sunday 👋🏾.
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