5 Pillars
• On his 85th birthday (his last one), Carl Jung created a 5 pillar recipe for a good life. Arthur Brooks summarizes them and adds his own feedback in this Atlantic piece.
1. Good physical and mental health
2. Good personal and intimate relationships, such as those of marriage, family, and friendships
3. Seeing beauty in art and in nature
4. A reasonable standard of living and satisfactory work
5. A philosophical or religious outlook that fosters resilience
Write it down
• Cool post from Twitter from Qian Julie Wang, a busy attorney who typed an entire memoir on her phone during commutes on the NYC subway. I have not read the book yet, but her story proves that we can all find moments in the day to reflect and to create.
Activity
• I highly recommend subscribing to Michael Easter’s “2%” Substack (referring to the 2% of people who take the stairs instead of escalator).
• A paywalled post from Friday covered the well-researched finding that hunter-gatherer tribes sit and lay down a lot, yet they burn far more calories than we do in our modern lives (and of course have far less chronic illness). The main difference in activity to explain these findings: our chairs and other furniture remove the need for muscle activation.
• Easter provides 4 tips on how to adopt more “ancestral” movement patterns:
1. Sit up straight with no backrest
2. Get up and down a lot during sitting sessions
3. Stand while you work (I would add walking meetings/calls)
4. Sit on the floor as much as possible
Protein Coffee
• Do you add protein to your coffee, or drink latte flavored ready to drink protein bottles? If so, check out Chike brand protein iced coffee. They are not cheap, but they taste remarkably good, especially the caramel flavor. Not sure how they achieve that taste while also keeping sugar/carbs low.
Be careful what you read
• According to this article in the prestigious PNAS, cognitive distortions such as mindreading, emotional reasoning, labeling and mislabeling, catastrophizing, dichotomous thinking, disqualifying, overgeneralizing, fortune-telling, personalizing are on the rise in English, German, and Spanish language texts. These thinking patterns are strongly associated with depression and anxiety.
• From the authors: “Our results point to the possibility that recent socioeconomic changes, new technology, and social media are associated with a surge of cognitive distortions.”
Irrational
• In a similar paper also in PNAS, Scheffer et al looked at the rise and fall of rationality in language. The paper dove into the trend of “emotional reasoning.”
• Looking at Google NGram data from 1850-2019 in books and New York Times articles, the authors used language analysis to find the following:
“The rise of fact-free argumentation may perhaps be understood as part of a deeper change. After the year 1850, the use of sentiment-laden words declined systematically, while the use of words associated with fact-based argumentation rose steadily. This pattern reversed in the 1980s, and this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.”
Quotes
It is also a very good plan every now and then to go away and have a little relaxation, for when you come back to the work, your judgment will be surer, since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose the power of judgment. It is also advisable to go some distance away, because then the work appears smaller, and more of it is taken in at a glance, and a lack of harmony or proportion in the various parts and the colors of the objects is more readily seen.
– Leonardo da Vinci, Italian engineer and painter
When we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
– Wendell Berry
