Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

Each week, I select a few articles that rise above the fray and hopefully help you on your journey in the CRE world. They pull from one of four "corners:" corporate real estate, technology, management science and anything positive. I welcome your comments on these articles.

1. For the New Year, Say No to Negativity

The new year is supposed to bring hope, but too often it feels grim. We resolve to be virtuous—to lose weight, to exercise, to unplug from social media—but we recall past failures and fear another losing struggle. We toast to a better, happier world in 2020, but we know there will be endless bad news and vitriol, especially this election year.

We could use a fresh approach. For 2020, here’s a resolution that could actually work: Go on a low-bad diet. Our minds and lives are skewed by a fundamental imbalance that is just now becoming clear to scientists: the negativity effect. Also known as the negativity bias, it’s the universal tendency for bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones.

We’re devastated by a word of criticism but unmoved by a shower of praise. We see the hostile face in the crowd and miss all the friendly smiles. We focus so much on bad news, especially in a digital world that magnifies its power, that we don’t realize how much better life is becoming for people around the world.

2. What’ll Happen In The Next Decade? Here Are 9 Predictions For The 2020s

Don’t take too seriously any speculations about what the next decade will hold. Be ready for another wave of astounding, unforeseen events.

Who in 2000 could have foreseen 9/11 or the economic crisis of 2008? Or the election of our first African-American president? Who in 2010 could have predicted the rise of political populism and the ascension of Donald Trump, Brexit or the aggressive foreign policies of China and Russia? Or the general breakdown in recent years of the post-WWII order that led to the avoidance of another global conflict and created conditions for the stunning rise in global living standards? (Over 1 billion people have emerged from dire poverty in the new millennium; that’s 137,000 people a day.) Or that billions of people would possess handheld devices that are virtually supercomputers? Or that Hong Kong would be rocked by pro-democracy demonstrations for months on end, which could, in the goodness of time, have profound repercussions in China itself?

Nonetheless, despite the future’s impenetrable fog, the itch to predict is irresistible. So here goes, in a few categories.

3. Three Theories for Why You Have No Time

One of the truisms of modern life is that nobody has any time. Everybody is busy, burned out, swamped, overwhelmed. So let’s try a simple thought experiment. Imagine that you came into possession of a magical new set of technologies that could automate or expedite every single part of your job.

What would you do with the extra time? Maybe you’d pick up a hobby, or have more children, or learn to luxuriate in the additional leisure. But what if I told you that you wouldn’t do any of those things: You would just work the exact same amount of time as before.

I can’t prove this, because I don’t know you. What I do know is that something remarkably similar to my hypothetical happened in the U.S. economy in the 20th century—not in factories, or in modern offices. But inside American homes.

4. Look Up

Richard F. Shepard, as keen and joyful a chronicler of New York as ever graced the pages of The Times, had simple advice for anyone out and about on the city streets. Look up, he said. Look especially at second-floor windows above storefronts. That, he liked to say, is where a lot of absorbing action takes place. Why would a perambulating soul wish to miss any of it?

One can imagine Mr. Shepard shaking his head at many of today’s New Yorkers. He died in 1998, so he never held an iPhone or, I’m willing to bet, any of its forerunners. But there’s little question that he would have found something hollow about this smartphone age, when so many people routinely violate the Shepard rule, New Yorkers being no exception. At any given moment, thousands of them are so focused on their little screens that they fail to look up. Truly, they don’t know what they’re missing.

Plenty has been written about the perils of modern electronic devices, real or feared: They’re rewiring brains. They’re shortening attention spans. They’re killing dinner-table conversation. They’re disrupting sleep patterns. They’re addictive. A somewhat ungainly word came into being a decade ago: nomophobia — short for no mobile phone phobia — meaning a fear of being without one’s phone, or at least without juice or network coverage.

5. No More Phones and Other Tech Predictions for the Next Decade

So here is 2019 in its last moments: The actress Sharon Stone gets kicked off a dating app for being herself, while the ever-screechy President Trump gets to stay on Twitter after retweeting fake accounts and links that appear to unmask a whistle-blower.

This is the state of the internet as the decade comes to a close. Confusion reigns, for good reason, about the many tech inventions that have been heaped upon us over the past 10 years. Few of us can even guess at what the next great innovation will be because the industry has stayed in neutral for too long. Meanwhile, tech I.P.O.s in 2019 were less than stellar (see Uber), bad economics were unmasked (see WeWork), and trust in tech eroded (see Facebook), even as the big got even bigger (also see Facebook).

It all feels very Yeats-y — things falling apart, the center not holding, anarchy loosed, drowned innocence, a lack of conviction from the best and, of course, endless loudmouthery from the worst.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

Ken Ashley