Two Links that may be of interest Distracted Driving & fulfilling weekends

[MattTuck]

2 years ago, New Hampshire passed a hands free law. Our NPR station's daily call-in show discussed the successes, the efforts to change the culture, and what the police are seeing out on the road.

http://nhpr.org/post/dangers-distracted-driving

The panel includes:
Lt. Patrick Cheetham - Police officer for the Londonderry Police Department, and president of the New Hampshire Police Association.
Daniel Goodman - Public affairs manager for AAA Northern New England.
Chelsie Hubicsak-Muldowney - Youth Operator Specialist at the Injury Prevention Center at the Children's Hospital at Dartmouth. She organizes programs and presentations for young drivers, and travels to schools and driver's education classes across the state.
Major Matt Shapiro - Highway Safety Commander at the NH Office of Highway Safety, and Operations Bureau Commander with the NH State Police.

The feeling from law enforcement, if I can generalize, is that most people know it is wrong and are aware of the law. This is thanks to a big education and public outreach campaign. They said the hard work now is in culture change, and getting people to over ride their desire to reach for their phone, which can be strong due to the addictive nature. It's an hour long show, but for those interested in this issue, I thought I'd pass it along.


Second link

In this article from Quartz, the author suggests that the secret to fulfillment is 'serious leisure' (as opposed to hedonic leisure). Judging by the variety of interests on this forum, I'd say many of you fit into this category already, but I thought it was interesting.

https://qz.com/1012585/the-best-week...rrently-doing/

According to University of Calgary sociologist Robert Stebbins, most leisure falls into two categories: casual and serious. Casual leisure pursuits are short lived, immediately gratifying, and often passive; they include activities like drinking, online shopping, and the aforementioned binge-watching. These diversions provide instant hedonic pleasure—quite literally, actually, as all these pastimes cause the brain to release dopamine and provide instant soothing comfort. In a culture where many people exist all week in an amped-up, overworked state, casual weekend leisure easily becomes the default for quick decompression.

If we’re not very good at leisure, it’s probably because we’re too good at work. But serious leisure is a far more beneficial pursuit. Serious leisure activities provide deeper fulfillment, and—to invoke a fuzzy ’70s word—“self-actualization.” Self-actualization is the pinnacle of human development, according to humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow, who describes it as “the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” In other words, getting self-actualized is the whole point of life, and passive, hedonistic leisure (fun and occasionally necessary as it might be) won’t get you there.

Instead, the weekend goal should be “eudaimonic” happiness, which is a sense of well-being that arises from meaningful, challenging activities that cause you to grow as a person. This means spending the weekend on serious leisure activities that require the regular refinement of skills: your barbershop-quartet singing, your stamp collecting, or slightly less dorky, but still equally in-depth, projects. You pursue serious leisure with the earnest tenor of a professional, even if the pursuit is amateur.

If we’re not very good at leisure, it’s probably because we’re too good at work. In his famous essay “In Praise of Idleness,” published in 1932, Bertrand Russell bemoaned the quality of leisure in an increasingly mechanized world:

“There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency…The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.”

[paredown]

good reads--thanks!