Introducing DailyFeats: rewarding you for positive actions

We’re thrilled to announce that DailyFeats – which we’ve been working intensely and purposefully on, like enthusiastic beavers nibbling at a great oak tree, for quite a while now – is launching its public beta! Come to dailyfeats.com to try it out. (Also, make sure you follow DailyFeats on Facebook and on Twitter.)

The point of DailyFeats is to reward people for the positive actions in their lives. When you take a positive action – something that supports good health, ongoing education, household care, sustainable living, or responsible community citizenship – you can check it in at DailyFeats, and earn rewards for it. This includes everything from making a budget to using a reusable mug; there are over 100 such actions available for checking in now, and we’re constantly adding new ones.

We’re doing this because we think that all these good actions, big or small, are feats – hence the name of the site – and that if we make it easy, fun, and rewarding for you to check in and explore feats, you’ll start finding more opportunities for them in your life. When you and your friends start doing more good every day, it makes the world a better place!

Checking in a feat is quick and easy – after you’ve completed any feat, whether you’ve reached the peak of a mountain or just climbed the stairs at work, you can check it in by web, phone, or email.

Every Feat is worth a certain number of points, plus more that your friends can give you if they see your feat on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Points at DailyFeats earn you rewards – offered by us and our partners, these rewards are meaningful social and monetary ways for you to celebrate your accomplishments.

Meanwhile, as you check in more Feats, DailyFeats starts to learn about you and the kinds of Feats you do. So after every check-in, we use your social and behavior profile to suggest more Feats you might like to try. We use all the information available to us to help you understand the good you’re doing, and how you can do more of it.

Interested? Get started now at dailyfeats.com. And stay tuned here, as well as on our Facebook and Twitter streams, as we keep developing DailyFeats; we’ll be writing periodically about our discoveries, as we work on bringing more good into the world.

Happy is the new healthy: What Mad Men Can Teach Us About Ourselves in 50 Years

Like many people these days, I am a fan of Mad Men. The women’s fashions alone make the show worth watching. But beyond the eye candy, I am fascinated by how the characters drink and smoke with abandon. It’s like they don’t even know that it’s bad for them. The truth is, they didn’t really know—not in the way that we know today.

Although, by the 1950s, researchers were already demonstrating that smoking and lack of exercise contribute to increased risk of disease and death, this knowledge hadn’t really begun to penetrate daily life (if you don’t believe this, just watch 5 minutes of Mad Men). Granted, smoking may have been a special case, given that big tobacco companies had a vested interest in holding back anti-smoking messaging. But what about physical exercise? Why didn’t it catch on as soon as scientists made the connection with heart disease?

What we see here is a good example of what researchers call the “translation lag”. That’s the 15-20 year lag that exists between the publication of scientific research and the translation of it into daily life. If the 1950s saw the beginnings of the scientific research that would drive the quest for physical fitness over the next several decades, it makes sense that we would not see its manifestations in everyday life until the late 1960s or later.

Looking back at how people lived 50 years ago inevitably makes me wonder what will seem obvious to others about our lifestyle 50 years from now. A standout possibility in my opinion is emotional health. I’m willing to bet that in 50 years people will view our lifestyles as being just as bad for our emotional health as we see Don Draper’s being for physical health.

In many ways, the state of emotional health research today parallels that of physical health in the 1950s. It has really just been within the last decade that research on emotional well-being has come into its own. Before Martin Seligman officially declared Positive Psychology to be a bona fide field of study, most mental health research was focused on mental illness, and not on factors that contribute to emotional health and wellness. Since Seligman expressly designated an academic niche for the study of psychological well-being, sound research in this area has exploded, and books for the layperson based on this research have become surprisingly popular.

Despite this, the topic of emotional wellness hasn’t found nearly the same level of social acceptance as physical wellness has come to enjoy over the past few decades. I believe that this is because we are still living in the days of Mad Men when it comes to emotional health. Scientists are just learning about how we can begin to cultivate emotional health, but we’re not quite ready to talk about it openly and publicly—not the way that we talk about our physical health. The word “mental” is still almost entirely fused with the word “illness.” Anti-stigma groups like Bring Change to Mind will surely help change attitudes about mental illness, freeing up the concept of “mental health” to represent something different—something that everyone can and should strive for.

Just as we now know that eating health foods and exercising regularly goes a long way to feeling well and preventing illness, research is showing that actively cultivating well-being is a critical part of mental health. But that’s not how we talk about it. In fact, we don’t really talk about it at all. That’s what makes us very much like Don Draper and what, I suspect, will stand out to the people watching TV shows about us in 50 years. Although we think we know a lot about a lot of things, I believe that in 50 years, people will say about us, “Wow, those people were totally oblivious. No wonder they weren’t very happy.”

It’s true that hindsight is always 20/20, but we’re actually talking about foresight here. Isn’t that one of the qualities that makes us distinctly human? So, I will leave us all with a challenge: To learn from the last 50 years so that we don’t have to wait until 2060 to apply the science of happiness.

Living on the Internet

A while ago, our office’s favorite coffee/ice-cream shop (Toscanini’s) was asked by MIT to develop an “Internet” flavor of ice cream, in honor of the Internet’s anniversary or something. The ice-cream wizards puzzled over it for a while, and came back with: vanilla, with Nerds™ in it.

I raise this anecdote because working for a web-oriented company, especially (as in my case) working with Internet content, means that you inevitably get sucked into the bizarre world of Internet culture. And despite the best efforts of Toscanini’s, this world defies description. It is at once incredibly diverse – available at this point to nearly everyone in the world, regardless of income or interests – and deeply nonrepresentative of the world’s population, skewed as it is toward people with money, time, and nothing better to do with them (read: upper-middle-class suburban teenagers). Its content encompasses the most obscure, unpredictable, bizarre niche interests imaginable, yet the most successful items are always the same cute-animal photos, Top 10 Whatever lists, and advertisements about weight loss and mortgage refinancing. It opens doors to brilliant creative talent that could never find expression in a mainstream outlet, yet is quickly putting so many valuable creative institutions – from newspapers to music labels – out of business. It welcomes participation from everyone, yet it mainly fosters self-contained communities that use imepenetrable, constantly evolving jargon to ruthlessly mock visitors and outsiders. And it contains 4chan, a community so incredible and bizarre that its very existence calls the laws of physics and nature into question.

Spending your entire work week in this swirling vortex of chaos – as I have, nonstop, for almost a year now – can do some seriously strange things to your perspective. I count “Trololo” among the great works of world music, for instance. But I’m less interested here in thinking about personal effects than systemic effects: what does the Internet mean for the way modern audiences interpret content? I don’t buy the facile argument you hear from conventional media critics that it only shortens our attention spans and promotes the constant pursuit of quick-hit novelty. This may be true to an extent, but considering the complexity of the Internet experience, there is no way its eventual impact can be that uniform. Besides, people said the same thing about comic books and rock ‘n’ roll music sixty years ago.

I’m also skeptical, conversely, of the claims you hear from Internet evangelists that the web is creating a new culture of participatory media where users always want to create original content and organically drive the direction of content discourse. This simply isn’t the case; the vast majority of Internet users do nothing but passively view content, much of which is prefabricated quite cynically by established content providers, or at best have inconsequential “discussions” that amount to self-perpetuating cycles of social posturing and rants. (Read any YouTube comment thread to see what I mean here.)

So how can we more accurately define the Internet’s impact? Over the coming weeks I’d like to have that discussion in this space, and get your thoughts (as what we can assume is a relatively engaged and idealistic subset of Internet users) on how to most accurately understand this enormous issue; please feel free to dive into comments!