This week on The Deep Dive: A decline in productivity sounds like your boss’s problem, there’s a reason that electrical outlet looks like a concerned face to you, older women are expected to toe a fine line when it comes to fashion, students aren’t getting worse but school might be, and there could be more to Abbott Elementary’s teachers than meets the eye.

I’ll be taking a much-needed break next week to spend time with family for the Thanksgiving holiday. The Deep Dive will return on Wednesday, November 29 but in the meantime, don’t forget to catch up on The Deep Dive’s YouTube playlist and shop The Deep Dive merch here. Happy holidays, rabbits! 🐰

CULTURE

Productivity Rips You Apart by Horses (11:45)

We’ve all been there. The day starts out full of promise and with a seemingly endless amount of time to check off all the items on your to-do list. You take some time to yourself and before you know it, the hours have somehow flown by without a single to-do being done. You get discouraged by your lack of productivity, kicking off the cycle all over again. In this video, Horses describes how our economic and social systems worked together to make productivity the single most important value for so many of us, but at what cost? How did office work rebrand productivity from being a macro issue to an issue so micro it forced individuals to “just work harder?” And are we just setting ourselves up for guaranteed burnout?

SCIENCE

Pareidolia: Seeing Faces in Things by Duncan Clarke (18:14)

People are annoying, but we also crave human connection so much that we’re able to see human-like faces in pretty much everything we look at: electrical outlets, car headlights, tree stumps, rock formations, and even pieces of burnt toast. In this video, Duncan Clarke explains this phenomenon of the human condition, called pareidolia. Why are we subconsciously so committed to seeing faces? How do artists play with pareidolia to create striking and multi-faceted paintings? And why does that upside-down picture of Margaret Thatcher have to be so terrifying?

This issue of The Deep Dive is sponsored by:

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