Mind & Meaning
Why the promotion, the house and the finish line so rarely feel as satisfying as we imagined
Think of the last thing you were certain would change the way you felt about your life.
Psychology
Nobody talks about how one bad moment can color a whole good day. The mind grips the negative more tightly than the positive — an ancient survival setting, handy for spotting danger, less so for living well
A few weeks ago I had what should have gone down as a good day. The morning's writing had gone well, I'd eaten lunch in a café I like, and I had a couple of hours of low-stakes errands to run.
Mind & Meaning
Concept of the day: the Zeigarnik effect — how unfinished tasks nag at the mind more than finished ones
There are two ebooks I always meant to write. I never quite started them, or perhaps better put I started and stalled.
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards”
We've all experienced it. The understanding arrives late. You only get the map after you have already walked the path, and by then you are somewhere else, walking a new one with no map at all.
Mind & Meaning
After analysing nearly 12,000 daily work diaries from 238 employees, Harvard researchers found that the strongest driver of a good inner work life wasn’t praise, pressure or incentives — it was making progress on meaningful work, even in small steps. They called it the progress principle.
Imagine handing nearly 12,000 end-of-day diary entries to a research team and asking them one question: on the days people felt good at work, what had actually happened?
Mind & Meaning
A 2010 Harvard study gathered a quarter of a million moments and found our minds wander about 47 per cent of waking life — and that drifting off, even to pleasant thoughts, leaves us no happier than staying with whatever we’re actually doing.
Almost half. That is roughly how much of our waking life we spend thinking about something other than what we are doing, according to a 2010 study out of Harvard.
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from Chinese philosopher Confucius: “To say you know when you know, and to say you do not when you do not, that is knowledge”
I looked something up the other day, read it, nodded along, and moved on. An hour later I went to explain it to someone and found I couldn't, not really.
Mind & Meaning
The IKEA effect in the age of AI
I have a drawer at home full of leather offcuts I cannot bring myself to throw away.
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from French philosopher Blaise Pascal: “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room”
I came across Pascal’s line again the other day and did the thing you do with a good quote: nodded, felt a little seen, moved on.
Mind & Meaning
The case for jotting down a few things we are grateful for
The image most of us have of a gratitude journal is a little precious. A leather notebook, a quiet corner, a candle maybe, and a person carefully composing several lines about the sunset and the smell of coffee.
Psychology
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.”
The kettle is doing its thing. Light is coming in sideways across the kichen table, the way it does early, catching the steam coming off the cup.
Mind & Meaning
In a 1999 experiment, people were asked to watch a short video and count how many times a basketball was passed. Around half of them completely failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit stroll into the middle of the scene
In 1999, psychologists showed people a short video of a basketball being passed around, asked them to count the passes, and then watched as about half of them…
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
A few years back I got into Stoicism, the way a lot of people do: a bit lost, looking for something that felt less like self-help and more like clear thinking.
Mind & Meaning
For much of human history, survival did not necessarily require a day filled with labour
Nobody told us to work this much. There’s no rule, no law, no biological imperative.
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: ‘It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.’
People say it all the time. Life is short. The years go fast. You hear it at birthday parties, in passing conversations, from anyone watching their kids grow up a little too quickly.
Psychology
In 1955, British historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a satirical essay about government bureaucracy. Seventy years later, the law that came from it may be more relevant than ever.
In 1955, a British historian named C. Northcote Parkinson published a short, sardonic essay in The Economist about why government departments keep growing regardless of how much work they actually have.