The Dose Newsletter

Positive psychology has had a remarkable run. It has transformed how schools think about students, how companies think about employees, how coaches work with athletes. Walk into any well-run organization today and you will find people talking about strengths, engagement, and meaning in ways that would have seemed unusual twenty years ago. The lay public has embraced it. Bookstores are full of it. My patients quote it back to me.

I recently dropped my youngest off at college. It was a bit of a rollercoaster. The good news–she is in a great dorm with a great roommate. The bad news–she (or apparently I) forgot to bring pillows and towels. Smiles, excitement, frustration, and irritation were all there. “You can go now,” she announced to my husband and me about an hour after arriving in her dorm room and six hours before our flight. The good news is that she was fine. I knew I would be fine too but the tears flowed anyway.

When I finished medical school, like all graduates I took the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. Primum Non Noncere. At the time, I remember laughing with my friends. Doesn’t this set the bar a little low? We had spent years training how to help and heal people. Wasn’t it a given that we would not do harm? Ideally, but not always. The Dose is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Harm is sometimes unavoidable.

A close friend of mine is in her 90s and she is one of the most alive people I know. For years we have gone on what she calls excursions together, to galleries and museums around New York. After a visit to a Caspar David Friedrich exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she sent me a note.

New York is a city of strong opinions and limited patience. That is what made this month so strange. The Knicks championship win brought an unfamiliar feeling to the city. For a few days, it was overflowing with a sense of unity, kindness, and joy. People in orange nodding at one another on the subway. Cashiers and customers talking like old friends about a fourth quarter they had each watched separately.

During the Boston Marathon, a runner named Ajay Haridasse collapsed about 1,000 feet from the finish line. Four times he tried to get up and four times he fell back down. And then someone stopped. Aaron Beggs, from Northern Ireland, looked at his watch, looked at Haridasse, and decided to help. Within moments, a second runner, Robson De Oliveira of Brazil, stopped too. Both men sacrificed their personal best times to carry a stranger across the finish line.

My commencement address on becoming, belonging, and why goodness matters more than greatness. As a psychiatrist, I spend a surprising amount of time helping people unlearn things. Not because they aren’t smart or capable, but because many of the messages we absorb about adulthood, happiness, identity, and success sound wise yet ultimately make us more anxious, isolated, and discouraged.

Did you hear about the Spanish woman named Carmen Jiménez who pretended to be blind for 28 years? Not because of an illness or accident, but because she couldn’t stand small talk. “I was tired of seeing people and stopping to say hello,” Carmen was quoted as saying.

I almost missed it. I was in a taxi on my way to the airport in the Bahamas, phone in hand, the familiar gravity of the scroll pulling at me. There were emails to check, headlines to skim, daily Duolingo lessons to complete (I’m on day 464 and my French score is 75 in case you’re wondering). But my battery was running low and the driver didn’t have a charger, so I put the phone away and a conversation unfolded.

We live in a world that tells us the goal is to be larger than life. But what if we’re missing out on the invaluable experience of feeling small? Four astronauts launched Wednesday evening from Kennedy Space Center, bound for the Moon. It is the first crewed mission beyond Earth’s orbit since 1972. In a few days, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will look back and see our planet the way almost no one ever has. If history is any guide, it will change them.