So much for 'social distancing'

Word choice, a bit more on schools, and 7 other things worth your time, an unusual number of which have something to do with sharks or unicorns.

When we close the books on 2020, one sad phrase will probably rise to the top of our collective memory: “social distancing.”

But wait, what if we’ve been doing “social distancing” wrong this whole time?

Meet Dr. Barbara Lee Fredrickson. She’s the head of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab at UNC.

So, she studies happiness. (Even if you knew nothing else, that seems like a pretty cool place to work.)

Earlier this summer, Fredrickson and her colleagues surveyed 600 Americans about their daily activities, and correlated how they spent their time with the degree to which they reported experiencing positive or negative emotions.

The results are interesting enough, but the thing I really took away was an “oh by the way” framing suggestion.

First, the study results. Some of this, I grant you, won’t be a shock. The UNC team found that people who spent time “passively scrolling social media” or “interacting with people purely through chat or text” were more likely to report feeling n…