life

The main reason we don’t create more affordances, however, is pure egocentrism. When we just say whatever pops into our heads, we may think we’re making craggy, climbable conversational rock walls, when in fact we’re creating completely frictionless surfaces. For example, I’m thrilled to tell you about the 126 escape rooms I’ve done, but my love for paying people $35 to lock me in a room blinds me to the fact that you probably do not give a hoot. I may even think I’m being generous by asking about your experiences with escape rooms, when my supposed giving is really just selfishness with a question mark at the end (“Enough of me talking about stuff I like. Time for you to talk about stuff I like!”).

Calorie intake, protein intake, and training volume are by far the most important factors determining your body composition and degree of swole-ness. Add in training intensity and specificity, and you’ve got the major factors determining strength as well.

Everything else is just details. And it’s not that details don’t matter; it’s just that unless you’re an elite-level athlete trying to eek out an extra percentage of performance, they don’t matter very much. In a complex, redundant system, details generally get lost in the noise, and end up having at most a trivial effect.

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In this conversation, artist and writer Jenny Odell points beyond the domination of clock time toward ways of being that are more in tune with the rhythms and patterns of the Earth.

Though it makes me feel like a grandmother on her deathbed to admit it, I remember the days when the internet was vast, when there seemed to be more places to go than anyone could ever visit and infinite things to read. What you saw was not determined by some highly protected coded algorithm that lives somewhere in the cloud. You could just go out and find it.

Ongoing loneliness, which can be accompanied by sadness, boredom or a sense of emptiness, can interfere with daily life. At times, loneliness may dampen the motivation to engage in day-to-day activities and even contribute to a withdrawal from others…

…Learning ways to cope with loneliness, then, might help with managing stress and maintaining overall wellness.

Three women of different ages and backgrounds discuss their relationships with makeup. They share their reasons for wearing makeup, including enhancing their natural beauty, transforming themselves through art, and using it as a shield or to distance themselves. They also discuss the role of social media in promoting a certain beauty standard and the pressure to conform to it. They acknowledge the importance of being comfortable with one’s natural self and express the desire for a society where makeup is not a requirement and people are not judged based on their appearance.

Much more in there, but the basics:

1. Focus on direction, not destination
   Immerse yourself completely in the journey and you will reach your final goal gradually.
2. Raise your hand
   Asking questions is a fundamental human right.
3. Learn at your own pace
   Find your rhythm, find your flow. Don’t compare yourself to others.
4. Unplug
   You have the right to disconnect and move your attention towards what’s essential. Learn unplugged, far away from digital distractions.
5. Change your learning path (and mind)
   Don’t get too comfortable in the habit zone and start with changing the aversion to change. Think differently and learn new things.
6. Take a break
   Micro-breaks, lunch breaks, and longer breaks will all improve your learning performance. You have the right to rest.
7. Make mistakes
   Don’t fall into despair but Fail Forward.
8. Leave it unfinished
   We live in a super busy, multi-tasking, results-oriented society. Step away from your long to-do list and enjoy once in a while the beauty of an unstructured day.
9. Unlearn and forget
   Harness the power of unlearning. Reboot your mind, abandon old knowledge, actions and behaviours to create space.
10. Slow down
    Sometimes slow and steady will win the learning race. Make haste slowly.

I’m sorry to break it to anyone who has trouble keeping their car out of a bike lane (or off a concrete barrier), but it’s not the bike lane’s fault you’re a shitty driver. If you hit something stationary, that’s your fault. Pay attention to the fucking road while you’re driving. It’s not too much to ask when other people’s lives are literally at stake.

Neuroscience suggests that loneliness doesn’t necessarily result from a lack of opportunity to meet others or a fear of social interactions. Instead, circuits in our brain and changes in our behavior can trap us in a catch-22 situation: While we desire connection with others, we view them as unreliable, judgmental and unfriendly. Consequently, we keep our distance, consciously or unconsciously spurning potential opportunities for connections.

Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”

Yet we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time. A friend, nearing 60, recently told me that whenever he looks in the mirror, he’s not so much unhappy with his appearance as startled by it—“as if there’s been some sort of error” were his exact words.

As unbecoming as they may be, the portrait a child takes might be the most frank visual diary of contemporary parenthood that can be found on one’s bloated camera roll. They are technicolor tributes to what it felt like to be in these homebound moments together, featuring us as we are, with a lot of chins, a lot of cellulite, a lot of messy hair. The photos do what kids do best: they wholeheartedly engage with the present moment.

…That means electric bicycles, which have become a much lower impact solution than cars, are booming in many Amish communities.

It’s a lot quicker to jump on your bike and go into town than it is to bring your horse into the barn, harness it to the buggy, and go. It’s a lot quicker and you travel faster too.