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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
The Korean War never officially ended: an armistice signed in 1953 paused the fighting, but no peace treaty followed, leaving the Korean Peninsula technically at war for more than seventy years
For centuries, nostalgia was treated as a disease. Since the mid-2000s, psychologists have reframed it as a source of meaning and connection
Relationship satisfaction at 50 predicted physical health at 80 better than cholesterol, a decades-long Harvard study found
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking."
Doomscrolling before bed is linked to higher stress, suppressed melatonin and poorer sleep, yet the people it affects most are often the ones who keep reaching for the phone
The loneliest period in a human life, according to population surveys across multiple countries, may come later than most people expect: loneliness climbs again in old age, driven more by widowhood and failing health than by age itself
In Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation study, the babies who seemed calmest when left alone had racing heart rates the whole time — their indifference was a performance, not a feeling
Caribou in northern Canada travel up to 5,000 kilometres a year, a rhythm so reliable that Indigenous communities structured entire calendars around it for thousands of years, and one that has shifted by weeks in the last two decades as tundra temperatures change
NASA debriefs and crew psychologists hear it often enough to treat it as normal readjustment: astronauts back from long missions describe observing their own lives rather than fully taking part in them
Elephants hold what many consider funerals, returning repeatedly to the bones of their dead, touching the skulls with their trunks, sometimes standing in silence for hours at a site with no apparent purpose other than to be there
