What's up in
Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
The single strongest predictor of late-life flourishing turns out to be not exercise, diet, or education — but how connected a person felt to their close relationships in their 50s, according to a Harvard study following more than 700 men (later expanding to their wives and children) for over 85 years that has begun to quietly redefine what dementia prevention actually looks like
Around 240 BCE, the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth using only two sticks, two cities in Egypt, and the angle of their shadows at noon on the summer solstice — and his result came within about 2 percent of the modern measurement, in one of the most elegant pieces of reasoning in human history
Only 66 years separate the Wright Brothers' first 12-second powered flight in 1903 from the Apollo 11 landing on the moon in 1969 — a span shorter than a single human lifetime — and the astronauts of Apollo 11 carried a small piece of wood from the original Wright Flyer's propeller with them to the lunar surface, in a quiet gesture acknowledging exactly how recent the entire arc of human flight actually is
Periodical cicadas in the eastern United States emerge from the ground every 13 or 17 years — both prime numbers, not by coincidence — because their long, indivisible cycles make it nearly impossible for any predator with a shorter life cycle to evolve to feed on them, in one of the most mathematically elegant defenses in the natural world
An isolated indigenous tribe living deep within the Amazon rainforest speaks a language with no numbers, no color words, and no past or fictitious tenses — and their unique culture relies so strictly on immediate, firsthand experience that they have no creation myths and cannot be taught basic arithmetic.
A survey of over one thousand adults found that vacationers were happier, but perhaps surprisingly the boost showed up mostly before the trip — in anticipation — and largely faded once they got home.
If you feel that the world is becoming less intelligent in some way, the data from Norway, Denmark, Finland, France, Britain, and Australia agrees with you, with average IQ scores in those countries falling continuously since the mid-1990s by an estimated five to seven points per generation.
Carl Jung suggested life splits into two halves, and the surprise is what the second is for — not more career or identity, but an inward turn he called individuation, reclaiming the parts of yourself the first half left behind
We tend to define boredom as the feeling of having nothing to do, but it might really be a failure of attention — a restless ache of wanting to engage your mind and being unable to.
By 2030, Korean women are projected to become the first population in human history with an average life expectancy above 90 years — exceeding even Japan — according to a Lancet study of 35 industrialized nations, in a demographic shift driven by improvements in cardiovascular health and near-universal healthcare access
