CommonEndeavour

@commonendeavour.bsky.social

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A place to explore political possibilities. Putting care and connection at the heart of our politics. www.commonendeavour.org

The new Common Endeavour homepage as it looks on a computer
At a time when AI companions are widely promoted as a remedy for loneliness, Folk suggests chatbots may function more like social junk food, providing short-term satiation at the cost of long-term fulfillment. Drawing on experimental, longitudinal, and cross-cultural methods, Folk investigates when, why, and for whom AI companions fall short of human connection. He shows that chatbots disappoint when they perform prototypically human behaviors, that their appeal depends on individual and cultural tendencies to anthropomorphize technology, and that, over the course of a year, chatbot use and loneliness reinforce one another. Folk’s work offers guidance for how we design, deploy, and think about AI companionship in an era of growing social disconnection.
Each history is part of the truth, and it's not like your truth is better than mine. It's like we have to live with each other's truths, and if we put them side by side together, we will find truth, and we can do that in music. Because that's what we do in music. From Classical Music Happy Hour: The Smokies: Mountains and Forgotten Family with Yo-Yo Ma, 22 Oct 2025 https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/classical-music-happy-hour/id1839323732
The cover of the booklet: The Care Manifesto by the Care Collective. Subtitle: The politics of interdependence.
A picture of the Common Endeavour home page with links to an About, a Motivating Ideas, and a What's Next page.
A screen shot of one of the Six Things Psychologists are talking about this week. It says: 3. Friendships are as Important for Your Health as Romantic Relationships, Experts Say High-quality friendships are essential for both mental and physical well-being. Research highlighted by The Washington Post shows that strong social connections can reduce the risk of depression and even make physical obstacles, like a steep climb, feel less exhausting. Yet society often fails to value these relationships as highly as romantic ones, notes social psychologist Bella DePaulo, PhD. Experts recommend nurturing friendships by being accessible during both good and bad times and practicing the reciprocity needed to build lasting trust.
An Iris Murdoch quotation: Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.
A screenshot of the report's description. It says: "Early relationships are foundational for lifelong health, learning, and well-being. Mutual, meaningful, and affirming moments of connection in the youngest relationships support brain development, resilience, and social-emotional growth. These experiences, known as early relational health (ERH), can also buffer the impacts of adversity and help create pathways toward thriving children, families, and communities."
I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. - Rainer Maria Rilke
Hanging out with economists did make me really think about making a lot more decisions on a fully rational basis. Economists bring a cold — not a cold-blooded, but a cold-eyed rationality to a lot of policy conversations that are very, very important. And I will never give up on that. But if you start looking at everything that way, it makes you a cold person. And so I feel like, for a while, I tried a form of being — as a parent, as a husband, as friend — that was a little bit like, That really doesn’t matter, the data show that doesn’t matter. And even though the data show that it doesn’t matter, how people feel about it matters. We’re all a lot more than what the probabilities say. Probability is very important, and data is important. But I feel like the connection between people is far more important. Decency is a virtue that has been appreciated throughout civilization. We see it. We have the ancient writings. I think it’s appreciated differently now than it has been in the past. But I think it will be appreciated more in the future and I think that decency is a kind of foundation upon which to build your life.
Common Endeavour is online www.commonendeavour.org Help us get the word out! Find out and share what’s important to us; how we think; how to be part of what we’re doing
Common Endeavour Is about connection . Connection with each other between our communities with the world around us
The place attachment concept focuses on how strongly people feel a sense of connection to a particular place and captures the distinction between the goods and services provided by that place and the emotional and symbolic relationships people form with place (Williams, Stewart, & Kruger, 2013). These connections can be positive or negative, depending upon one's experience in place (Manzo, 2005). However, conceptualizations of place attachment vary depending upon the whether scholars focus on the personal, environmental, and/or social context of people-place interactions (Raymond, Brown, & Weber, 2010). Multiple studies have emphasized the personal context, particularly the emotional and physical/
Faculty are Facilitating Career Connections for Young Researchers. Jobs in academia are becoming scarcer, leading faculty to consider how to better prepare students for research careers outside the ivory tower.
ethinking Masculinity to Build Healthier Outcomes Rigid gender norms are taking a serious toll on boys’ and men’s mental health, prompting psychologists to promote healthier masculinities rooted in emotional connection, authenticity, and resilience.
A diagram showing two steps in the process of developing the movement, platform political party idea for Common Endeavour.
I want to share one last thought that has helped me in my own family discussions. I just read over the weekend a tip that John Inazu, professor of law and religion at Washington University, shares to remember how to develop this civic muscle (sounds like the Braver Angels Way). He calls it G-R-A-C-E: Ground yourself in your convictions Respect others Assume complexity (more to the story), not character (assuming someone is evil) Cultivate curiosity Engage with empathy Even now. Especially now. We need to practice grace in our courageous citizenship.
“Here a problem is being solved, gradually and practically, by a community of people to the best of their abilities. Here the hard labour of collective decision-taking and world-making is being carried out, imperfectly but necessarily, and with a care that extends not only for a decade or a generation but far forwards into a post-human future. Maybe this is among the best things we can try to do, I think, as Sampo grinds through the world’s epochs: to be good ancestors.”
“In our conversation, Henry reaches back 40-odd years for a moment of political opportunity analogous to the present, to the transition from the policy inertia of the late 1970s to the reform era of the 1980s, when the political system, for a decade or so “realised that there might be advantage in actually doing something rather than just sitting around and having arguments about it”.
The truth is, good conflict can help uncover opportunity and even create connection. But that requires a mental shift: instead of thinking of conflict as a fight, approach it as a friction — necessary resistance that helps you get stronger and more resilient. It’s not about being the victim or the villain but rather a detective –– investigating the problem, identifying options, and focusing on what you can control.
In recent decades, many politicians and generals have planned for short wars but ended up getting long ones, the scholar Lawrence Freedman wrote this spring. Wars become intractable, he argued, when political and military objectives do not align. Combat rarely resolves the root causes of a dispute and cease-fires can become mere pauses that allow both sides to prepare for more fighting. “One of the great allures of military power is that it promises to bring conflicts to a quick and decisive conclusion,” Freedman wrote. Yet “in practice, it rarely does.”
Coles magazine cover, in which MasterChef judge Sofia Levin describes connection in a grocery chain magazine.
Improvement comes from within schools
The text of the Emily Dickinson poem “We never know how high we are”
A figure showing a triangle of first preference votes broken down by Labor, LNP, and Other candidates. The national vote is just inside the Labor section.
A green bush on a suburban street with pretty pink flowers and a power line in the background
The Progressive Action Lab home page, which describes the lab’s interests as reviving political participation, the future of political parties, and getting the best people into parliament.
A pink neon sign on a brick wall. The sign says: Imagine me and you
A screenshot quoting Timothy Garton-Ash describing the warm-hearted nation that can result from a civic-based national identity.
Screen shot of a quotation of Sally Sitou urging a politician to be someone who aims to unite, not divide.