Read the best life articles from around the internet, or watch the most insightful life videos from platforms like Youtube, Vimeo or leading life publishers like The New York Times, BBC, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair and many more.
Okinawa, long known as the island of the immortals, is home to the highest concentration of centenarians in Japan. The village of Kitanakagusuku ranks first in Japanese women’s longevity. What is it about this island that makes its inhabitants live a longer and happier life?
“Never count on a man,” her father had told her. “They will always let you down.” So she didn’t, and they still did.
Why do people in the prime of their lives seem to be preparing for their demise? The answers vary widely, from eminently practical concerns, such as crushing debt and climate change, to social factors, like wellness culture, diverse spiritual practices, and the desire of some millennials to “curate their afterlives.”
Most of us think we know what aging looks and feels like. It announces itself with wrinkled skin and gray, thinning hair. But scientists are cataloging far subtler signs of biological aging, evident long before hair is lost and skin starts to crinkle.
Start your habit by reading, say, five pages of a book that interests you every day. Once you’re hitting five pages a day, try ten, then twenty, and keep pushing your goal horizon upward. Focusing on your own interests is key.
Sigmund Freud argued that we humans are naturally awful creatures – aggressive, narcissistic wolves. We have the civilizing influence of religion to steer us toward charity, compassion and cooperation by a system of carrots and sticks, otherwise known as heaven and hell.
We are on the verge of perhaps the greatest innovation in the history of our species — a genetically altered future in which many of us will conceive our offspring in labs. If we want to control this future, now is the time to question what we want it to be.
The United States has been a laboratory for experiments in alternative living since its founding. As so-called intentional communities proliferate across the country, a subset of Americans is discovering the value of opting out of contemporary society.
There are many potential answers but all are derivative of the same goal: communicating empathy and offering assistance, empathizing with what a person is going through, understanding what a person might need from you, and knowing how to phrase sentiments the right way.
Living a life free from screens. It’s something we all wish we could do, but, thanks to the now-ubiquitous nature of technology, can’t. I spent a week cutting my screen time in half each successive day: eight hours on Monday, four hours on Tuesday, and so on until I had less than 10 minutes on Sunday.
The social drug of choice in Western culture is alcohol. Yet drinking is estimated to kill 100,000 a year in the UK alone. Should we wean ourselves off alcohol or even ban it, and instead promote other less harmful but currently illegal alternatives?
Between 1990 and 2015, raising the minimum wage by $1 in each state might have saved more than 27,000 lives, according to a report published this week in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. An increase of $2 in each state’s minimum wage could have prevented more than 57,000 suicides.
Because my father believed that debt was sinful, and believed God wanted him and my mom to have as many kids as possible, they were too broke to help me pay for college. Because of this anti-debt theology, I wasn’t allowed to take out student loans, and had to attend a really conservative Christian college because it was so cheap.
We’re spoiled, entitled, lazy, and failures at what’s come to be known as “adulting,” a word invented by millennials as a catchall for the tasks of self-sufficient existence. I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected.
Life in the 21st century, we are told, is faster than ever. Time is scarce, the pace of everyday life is accelerating, and everyone complains about how busy they are. For all the smart tech, we still feel pressed for time. Are digital services the problem, or are we humans to blame?
We live in a society which sees high self-esteem as a proof of well-being, but we do not want to be intimate with this admirable and desirable person. We think we are unique, special and deserving of happiness, but we are terrified of being alone.
Scientific research suggests that you should adopt an ancient rhetorical method favoured by the likes of Julius Caesar and known as ‘illeism’ – or speaking about yourself in the third person — the term was coined in 1809 by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge from the Latin ille meaning ‘he, that’.
No matter how old you are or what type of role you have in life, there are times you’re a follower, and there are times you’re a leader. I don’t care whether you’re in high school or leading a firm with 500 people, some situations require leadership.
We live in the age of envy. Career envy, kitchen envy, children envy, food envy, upper arm envy, holiday envy. You name it, there’s an envy for it. Social media has created a world in which everyone seems ecstatic – apart from us. Is there any way for people to curb their resentment?
Love languages let you in on what makes your partner tick. The idea is: we all express and feel love differently, and understanding those differences can seriously help your relationship. In fact, it’s one of the simplest ways to improve it. This term was coined by longtime relationship counselor Gary Chapman.
After watching how my family treated my lesbian mom, I assumed it would all repeat when I came out. But as my grandma’s memory faded, her disapproval of gay people vanished too. My grandma had lost a lot of her memory, and she’d apparently forgotten her disapproval of same-sex relationships too.
Thinking is what gave humans ascendancy. But overthinking is threatening to bring us down. The despair from comparing ourselves with others is the original fake news. We need to develop a new relationship with our thoughts.
You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you?
Identify the problem. State what needs to happen. Offer to help. Simple, right? If we want to learn, we need to tolerate the feeling of inauthenticity long enough to integrate the new way of being. Long enough for the new way of being to feel natural.
Meet the consultants who help clients find love online — and, sometimes, assume their identities to chat with potential matches. Through one-on-one sessions and monthly retainers, Steve Dean helps clients reach their romantic goals, dispensing what is often brutally honest advice.
Confirmation bias is the human tendency to seek, interpret and remember information that confirms pre-existing beliefs. It is insidious. It affects every choice you make. Every. Single. Day. The things you choose to buy, your health, who you choose to marry, your career, your emotions, and your finances.
For one month, Madeleine Dore declined all in-person activities with friends to see if it would make her more productive – with surprising results. The trick to being successful could, in fact, be simple.
For $12 an hour, “data associates” listened to snippets of random conversations and jotted down every word on their laptops. Amazon would only say the work was critical to a top-secret speech-recognition product. The clips included recordings of intimate moments inside people’s homes.
I found myself single in a town where the non-student population is 1,236 people. I briefly considered flirting with the cute local bartender, the cute local mailman. For the first time in my life, I decided to date online. But finding someone fully and messily human was harder than I thought.
Increase your output, get paid more. Wages go up with productivity. Until, it turns out, they don’t anymore. The unwinding of this agreement in recent decades, such that workers must continue to produce more without expecting it to show up in their pay stubs, has now been the subject of a good deal of discussion and debate.
“Time” is the most frequently used noun in the English language. Most of us tend to think of time as linear, absolute and constantly “running out” – but is that really true? And how can we change our perceptions to feel better about its passing?
What do these people have that the rest of us don’t? It turns out “ability” is the key word here. Beyond their level of privilege or the circumstances they were born into, the luckiest people may have a specific set of skills that bring chance opportunities their way.
The average start time for public high schools, 7:59, requires teens to get up earlier than is ideal for their biological clocks, meaning many teens disrupt their natural sleep patterns every school day. The world, apparently, does not revolve around parents either. Their lives also tend to be mismatched with school-day schedules.
My father was among the founders of ‘Decision Science’ in the 1960s and 70s…and spent the last 10 years of his life trying to write a popular book on decision-making for the masses, something that would cement his legacy. Karen Brown recalls the pain and joy of fulfilling a deathbed promise.
Around them, death was everywhere. Still, the lovers planned a life together, a future outside of Auschwitz. They knew they would be separated, but they had a plan, after the fighting was done, to reunite. It took them 72 years.
Why do some people so clearly have it and others don’t? Why do we fall so easily under its influence? Charismatics can make us feel charmed and great about ourselves. They can inspire us to excel. But they can also be dangerous. They use charisma for their own purposes, to enhance their power, to manipulate others.
People on long-term foreign assignments often find it hard to adjust once they return home. Many leave their company within a few years, and some leave the country entirely. Long absences can play havoc with a person’s sense of identity, a feeling that is intensified by the length of time away and how often they visit home.
The challenge is that you’re competing against every individual in your industry who wants to be a high performer. If you grow more capabilities more quickly than they do, you’ll perform better today, earn opportunities to perform better in the future, and a virtuous cycle will take hold.
Productivity has been a topic of discussion ever since ancient eastern and western philosophy started. It’s a universal theme. I believe it’s in our nature to make better use of our time. Let’s start by learning the following 7 productivity lessons from the most well-known philosophers in history.
What Instagram has allowed me to do is to employ a kind of digital physics, to warp my experience of space and time in my favor. In the offline world, I spend precious hours with her and then she disappears. But online, she is with me again when I post, and then again each time I receive a notification.
