Here’s an idea for a science fiction novel: there’s a planet whose residents have spent millions of years learning to find a scarce and precious stubstance that keeps them alive. Evolution weeded out everyone who wasn’t extremely determined to locate and exploit this resource. This precious substance, in its many forms, is naturally loved and celebrated by all, and has a central role in every culture on the planet. The sci-fi twist comes when people discover technologies that can produce vast quantities of this once-scarce resource. Over the course of a few generations, people go from contend ..read more

I don’t know if people say this anymore, but it was common in the 1990s to say “smoking one cigarette takes ten minutes off your life.” It obviously doesn’t work like that exactly, but it may not be total nonsense — this study says the loss of life comes to about eleven minutes, by adding up all known increased health risks and their life-expectancy differences, and dividing by the average number of cigarettes smoked by daily smokers. Smoking X cigarettes shortens a life, on average, by XY minutes. Fair enough. Most of my friends and family don’t know this, but during my early twenties I smok ..read more

When I was a kid we had an aquarium with a betta in it, also known as a Siamese fighting fish. We were told that male betta fish try to kill each other on sight, so you are definitely not supposed to hold a mirror up to the side of the tank to make it look like it has a competitor. Of course we had to try it once, and it did indeed try to fight its mirror-bound intruder, so my dad made us stop before it hurt itself. When we took the mirror away, it resumed its normal routine of lazily swimming around, as though its foe had never been there at all. It didn’t seem to remember the other fish or ..read more

Some percentage of you are your own boss, or work from home, or otherwise have a dangerous level of flexibility around when you actually get to work. Some of you also know you’re especially prone to procrastination, even on a good day. If you’re both of these things, you know how deadly the combination can be. Severe procrastination isn’t just annoying or frustrating, it’s a tragic loss of life. You let days and weeks go by for no good reason and hate yourself for it. After battling with this for several decades, I have no cures but many tools. Here’s one that helps me a lot. How to Do Things ..read more

I’m always looking for alternatives to standard New Year’s resolutions. They’re just too simple to work unless you get lucky. You gather your resolve around one behavioral aspiration, apply it to that festive but fleeting moment when the calendar changes over, and hope there are no momentum-killing setbacks too early on. I’m trying something different this year. I started it in December but I could see myself doing this on New Year’s Day every year. It could be done alongside traditional resolutions, or instead of them. Here’s the basic idea. Instead of trying to change overnight on January 1 ..read more

If you want to get better at something – writing screenplays, gardening, making omelets, playing Tetris, organizing closets — find a way to do that thing with an expert, even if it’s just for an afternoon. They’ll give you pointers, of course, but the real benefit is in how an expert can help you see the activity from a completely different viewpoint. I got a lot better at rock climbing in 2022. That’s mainly because I did a lot of it. If I were to graph my progress, however, it wouldn’t be a straight line. It would rise slowly until the beginning of October, then angle up like a mountain ove ..read more

I once knew a man transformed by vegetables. When I first met him, he claimed he could barely stand to eat them, and rarely did so on his own initiative. Six months later we both ended up at the same party, and I wouldn’t have recognized him if he didn’t recognize me. He looked like a fashion model. During our conversation I brought up the vegetable question, and he told me that he had conceded to eating them at every meal and that they weren’t that bad. He still didn’t love them but he recognized their superpowers. I always liked vegetables, or at least I thought I did. I began to question t ..read more

The shrewd parts of my brain can’t help but admire Planet Fitness’s business model. It’s a gym made for people who don’t like gyms and don’t want to go to them, which must be a huge slice of the market for gym memberships. More specifically, they market to people who are afraid of the gym — people who dreaded gym class and dread commercial gyms, but still want to be fitter and healthier. Helping this segment of the population get fit, if that’s their intent, is a noble and honest goal. I remember how intimidating it was to go at first. I pictured muscle dudes and fitness models rolling their ..read more

I appreciate Sam Harris’s apt analogy about inner monologues — being caught up in your own thinking is like having been kidnapped and held hostage by the most boring person on earth. You’re forced to listen, as though at gunpoint, to an internal commentator who insists on telling you its impressions of everything it notices or thinks about. Nothing is too petty, too repetitive, or too obvious for the boring kidnapper’s ongoing monologue: Susan was wrong to criticize people who wear Crocs to the grocery store; a certain politician is the worst person alive and here’s why; your ex-partner was d ..read more

I have a radical proposal. An experiment that might just change your life. If you want to try it, I’ll do it with you. It goes like this: Live most of your days according to your normal habits, doing your job and your everyday stuff the same as always. Then one day a week, let’s say Tuesday, you live by a specific dictum: From the minute you wake up, do without hesitation the thing that most needs to be done in each moment, regardless of how appealing it is. Bring your full attention to each such act, as though it’s your sole purpose on earth. Let go of every other concern. In other words ..read more