![]() In all kinds of areas, when depressed people were measured against people who were emotionally healthy, their assessments were more realistic.īAUMEISTER: Depressed people seemed to hit it pretty much on the head. ![]() SPIEGEL: But then a bunch of research showed that actually it wasn't the depressed people whose view of reality was distorted. Their view of the world, it was believed, was deeply negatively skewed.īAUMEISTER: What is wrong with these depressed people that they twist things in this negative way and see things in such a negative fashion? SPIEGEL: For decades, according to Baumeister, the belief in psychology was that reality was an important thing to understand and that people who were mentally troubled - for instance, depressed people - just couldn't really grasp reality. SPIEGEL: This is Roy Baumeister, president of the Society for the Study of Motivation, who for many years has tracked how psychologists view reality.īAUMEISTER: Well, the assumption for a long time was that mental health meant seeing the world as it is. ROY BAUMEISTER: I mean reality always has its uses. SPIEGEL: So how does confronting reality affect us? Is it more likely to motivate or overwhelm us? That's an empirical question, but once you start down the path of trying to understand how psychologists have answered that question, you find yourself in the middle of a very interesting history. GURY: You know, it's a reminder of you're only here for a little bit and you really have to make everything matter. SPIEGEL: This is the premise literally built into ALARM clock, that being confronted with reality, or some approximation of reality, might feel harsh but is ultimately helpful to people who want to live their lives right. You see a little bit of a motivating number, you know, that corresponds to how well you are doing in life. So that every morning when you open your eyes. SPIEGEL: That's Ryan Gury, one of the people who created ALARM clock, programmed it to remotely pull information from your bank accounts and social networks, programmed it also so that after filling out information about your age and your health habits and your family history, it could use actuarial tables to estimate - and then display - the number of days until your death. It tells how many friends you currently have online, and it tells you how many days you have left to live. ![]() It tells you how much money you have in your savings account. RYAN GURY: Instead of telling you the time, it tells you three very important things. A small rectangle with a digital display - in every way indistinguishable from any other alarm clock. NPR's Alix Spiegel took a look and found the clock led her into some much deeper issues.ĪLIX SPIEGEL, BYLINE: It's designed to sit on your bedside table. The Chicago based company Fig believes the clock will help keep people motivated to meet their life goals. Yesterday we heard about an unusual wristwatch that challenged how we look at time and today we bring you a story about an alarm clock designed to help you stick to those New Year's resolutions. Around New Year's lots of us are thinking about time and how we spend it.
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