James' World 2

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Everyone likes efficiency: If you can simplify a task, especially a task you need to do multiple times every day, your life becomes that much easier. NFC tags can help you turn these types of repetitive obligations into simple automations, and you don’t need many tech skills to start. In fact, all you actually need is a smartphone and a tag.

What are NFC tags?

NFC tags are stickers with “near field communication” technology built in. You know NFC from services like Apple Pay or Google Pay: It’s technology that lets two devices communicate with each other quickly and instantly. Your smartphone has NFC, as do these tags.

Unlike a POS (point of sale) at the store, however, NFC tags are a blank slate: You won’t be using one to purchase a product (although you could probably program it to do that), but you can use NFC tags to do just about anything you can think of using your iPhone or Android, specifically automated tasks that can save you time and energy.

For example, this Instagram creator uses an NFC tag as a way to communicate with her partner whenever one of them feeds the dog. It’s a great use case: Whenever one of them gives the dog breakfast on their way out for the day, they’ll scan the NFC tag. Doing so triggers an automation on their iPhone to send a text to the other that reads, “The dog has been fed.”

Another example is for simple wifi sharing, at least on Android: When someone new comes over your house, instead of pointing them to a sign with your wifi information on it, they can hover their smartphone over an NFC tag (maybe outfitted with a wifi theme for easy identification), which will trigger an automation to connect them to your home internet.

How to set up an NFC tag on your iPhone or Android

Because of the seemingly endless possibilities with NFC tags, there’s no single universal guide for setting up NFC tags. If you have a specific task you have in mind, you’ll need to do some research to figure out the exact steps to make it work. However, there are some universal aspects about using NFC tags in general, so we’ll get you started.

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Photo: Julia Albul (Shutterstock)

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Your mind flits away, zigzagging near and far until you notice the other attendees gathering up their notebooks and tablets as they head for the door. The lecture is over, and you’ve missed out on much of the wisdom that held you momentarily entranced.

In our age of handheld devices and communicable ADHD, human beings are more distracted than ever. No matter how determined our efforts to keep focused, our eyes and our minds seem equally determined to ricochet hither and thither, drawn to any target that will eclipse what should be the object of our attention.

It may be comforting to learn that, by design, rapid eye movement extends beyond the realm of sleeping and dreaming. Even better news is that it’s not necessarily a symptom of inattention when we’re awake. In fact, just the opposite may be true. Which brings us to our most recent entry into the Ethical Lexicon:

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[Source Photo: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels]

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On a January evening in 1992, I was sitting in our kitchen, reading a comic book. My older sister Claudia went out to run an errand at a nearby minimart, just before it closed. Her keys jingled as she said goodbye and pulled the door shut. Her footsteps rushed down the stairs. A minute later, I heard her slam the garage door after she had pulled out her bicycle. Moments later, I heard a loud thud from down the street. I also thought I heard a muffled scream. I was 10. I couldn’t connect the dots.

A speeding car had hit Claudia while she was crossing the street. She didn’t die on the spot. Her boyfriend rushed my mom to the hospital. They spent the night at the ICU, while I spent the night in my best friend’s apartment. We set up camp on mattresses on his living room floor. He said: ‘I’m sure it’s just a broken leg.’ I said: ‘You’re right, she’ll be fine.’ We prayed. The next day, my mom stood in the doorframe, sobbing. ‘Claudia is dead,’ she said. I hugged her. I knew I had to be strong for her. What I did not know is that my sister’s death would, in some way, end my mom’s life as well.

We cried at the funeral. We cried at the cemetery. We cried at home. After a few months, I stopped crying. My mom never stopped crying. She became obsessed with Claudia’s grave. She would visit it every day, clean the white marble and bring fresh flowers. At the same time, she became frustrated and angry with the world. I spent my entire youth listening to her angry words, but her grief wouldn’t recede the tiniest bit.

Somewhere in my teens, I concluded that she must be suffering from depression. But I was wrong.

It’s no surprise I had it wrong. Back in the day, even professional psychologists lacked an official diagnosis for persisting grief. That changed in March 2022, when the condition my mom most likely suffered from was added as ‘prolonged grief disorder’ to the latest revision of the psychologists’ diagnostic manual, the DSM–5-TR. The diagnosis hinges on two factors. The first is denial: mourners cannot accept the death of the person they lost. This, in turn, causes symptoms like sadness, anger, or guilt that last for more than 12 months.

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Need to know

Do you feel blah? Not exactly suffering, but lacking interest and excitement? Do your days feel like a monotonous toil, akin to toothbrushing, but stretched over the entire day: same routines, same tiny annoyances? Are you unable to find motivation to do the activities that used to give you joy? If this describes your experience, then you may be going through a period of languishing.

People often think of mood as a battle between well-being and illbeing: either you feel good or bad. But if you don’t feel much of either, that’s the territory of languishing. It’s ‘the neglected middle child of mental health’, as Adam Grant put it in The New York Times in 2021. Whereas depression is active illbeing – feeling sad, powerless, and drained – and flourishing is active well-being – feeling engaged, excited, and empowered – languishing sits in between. It is a sense of stagnation where nothing is too wrong or painful but everything feels a bit boring and uninteresting. The world is grey.

A brief taxonomy of well-being states

To further understand languishing, it helps to recognize that an absence of illbeing does not mean the presence of well-being. Psychological research has shown that positive and negative feelings are partly independent processes – even neurologically and biologically. In moments of flourishing, you are high on excitement and joy, and low on negative feelings. In moments of suffering, there is not much joy but only sadness in our life. But there are also bittersweet moments where we feel strong positive and negative emotions simultaneously – such as feeling excited about one’s new job while feeling sad about leaving the old work community. Then there is languishing – moments when we don’t feel much of either. Languishing is thus about feeling low – but low on both positive and negative feelings.

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Katharina Merian, attributed to the 16th-century painter Hans Brosamer. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York

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As a therapist who counsels couples, I have seen many people struggle with tough problems that are difficult to talk about. How do you tell a partner you do not want to move in together? Should you reveal an affair? In almost every relationship, there is an issue where someone is growing increasingly resentful.

It could be significant, like a waning sex life. Or it could be small, such as the partner never replacing the empty toilet paper roll. In each of these examples, one person can be stuck in a decision limbo. They are not happy but they are unsure what to do about it. A decisional impasse ranks high among the reasons people seek marital therapy.

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(Celia Jacobs for The Washington Post)

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