thor Oliver Burkeman wrote: "Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I'm falling behind." It takes a lot to sustain this Rube Goldberg machine you call a life. All the errands and duties can feel like a case study in entropy prevention. And they never seem to end. The clowns keep coming out of the clown car and you’re like Beaker from the Muppets putting out fires in the lab. You can…
le Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends And Influence People” was wrong. Well, at least one of his principles was. But we’ll get to that in a second… Like you, I spent the pandemic not seeing friends nearly as often – but I was actually writing about friendship at the time. Oh, irony. The second section of my new book Plays Well With Others gives the Mythbusters treatment to the old maxim “Is a friend in need a friend indeed?” Post-pandemic, I…
Living a good life means managing your time. Problem is, we don’t understand time at all. Go ahead, explain time to me; I’ll wait. (Eric hums to himself and drums fingers on the tabletop.) Don’t blame yourself. To be fair, the nature of time has been a matter of some debate…
Friends are important. Yeah, yeah, I know: the only thing surprising about that is nothing. But how important are friends really? They’re critical for happiness. (I’m not even gonna quote stats on that one because you know it’s true.) Let’s up the stakes a bit, shall we? Julianne Holt-Lunstad reviewed 148…
he world might be all go-go-go but that doesn't mean we are... When Gallup researcher Tom Rath surveyed 10,000 people only 11% said they felt like they had a lot of energy. From Are You Fully Charged?: When we surveyed more than 10,000 people to see how they were doing across…
eing charming. Is there a more enviable quality? We'd hate charming people if we didn't love them so much. I've covered how to be sexy and cool but charming, well, that's a whole 'nother beast. And what a beautiful beast it is. We're going to pull together the research from many, many... well, far too…
orget pandas. Close friends are the real endangered species these days. That's a painful thing. And I don't mean "sad-painful." I mean "broken-arm-painful." At least that's how your brain sees it. Your grey matter experiences social pain the exact same way it does physical pain. So much so that Tylenol actually…
elationships are important. Like, more-important-than-Vitamin-C important. Scurvy is no fun but a lack of relationships might kill you faster. From The Relationship Cure: A study of people living in Alameda County, California, for example, showed that people who had close friendships and marriages lived longer than those who didn’t. This…
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