8 reasons why it’s time to become a birdwatcher

May 2020.

Early pandemic.

Screechy zoom call in my kid’s bedroom.

My eyes gaze out the window.

I see a robin on a wire.

Wait.

Is that a robin?

The call ends and I run to the basement.

I pull open a bin in the storage room and find binoculars.

I run up and hold them up to my eyes.

I twiddle the dial and it suddenly pops—

I was blown away!

What was this bird?

Wait, what was that app Alec was telling me about last week after tennis?

The one where he clicked some buttons—

—and told us the little bird playing in the dirt outside the tennis courts was a ... House Finch?

Oh, right!

I remembered Alec's line.

“It’s the name of a wizard … and the name of a bird.”

Merlin!

I opened the App Store and typed in “merlin” and ​downloaded it​.

I clicked some buttons—

And found out the bird out my window was a ... ​Rose-breasted Grosbeak​!

I had never seen one before!

I looked out the window again and now there were two.

Maybe three?

Next week we ordered and set up a trampoline in our backyard.

The ​Rose-breasted Grosbeaks​ hung out on the wires above my kids jumping up and down for a few days.

I downloaded the sister app ​eBird​ and made a free account to start tracking the birds I saw.

And now I've been tracking for five years!

Today I tell you very honestly:

Becoming a birder was one of the best things I have ever done.

It has fundamentally changed my life.

I feel happier! I’m a better listener. Outside more. Moving more. Less screens. More patience.

I feel like a better dad, husband, son … and self.

Today I'm 45.

Started birding when I was 40.

If I knew how big a difference it would make I would have started sooner!

I think for years I just needed a nudge.

So for the younger me, for anybody out there who needs a nudge, I am here today to tell you it is absolutely, definitely, a million percent time for you to become a birder.

Here are 8 reasons why:

1. It’s good for your body

Does your back hurt? Neck sore? Mine, too. Curling our bowling ball heads around tinier screens—squinting our eyes, squeezing our spines. Uhhh. Talked to a chiro or physio lately? Business is booming! Screen use has skyrocketed. And sitting. So much sitting! Been a decade since we declared “​sitting is the new smoking​” and yet … here we are, ​still sitting​. Desks, planes, couches—just look around. Everyone's sitting! Well, birding shakes up our sedentary lifestyle and acts as a slow and natural physiological readjustment against these forces. Birding helps us look straight again ... and then up ... and then deep. We widen our aperture staring into forest canopies instead of squinting into tiny techy watches. And let's not forget ​Dr. Qing Li’s​ incredible ​research​ on 森林浴—aka “shinrin-yoku,” aka “forest bathing”—which shows trees release ​phytoncides​ which naturally reduce blood pressure, reduce blood sugar, reduce cortisol, reduce adrenaline, and increase production of NK (“anti-cancer”) white blood cells. Birding is good on the body.

2. It’s good for your mind

​Jonathan Haidt​, author of ‘​The Anxious Generation​’ (​04/2024)​, has shown ​TikTok’s own internal strategy​ is to ensnare younger and younger people into its addictive forever-loops. He quotes internal documents that report using social media platforms creates “a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.” We know we have a problem! That’s why there’s a siren call globally right now to get ​screens out of schools​. Maybe it goes back to ​Jiddu Krishnamurti​ (1895-1986) warning us that computers may lead our brains to be “thoroughly employed in amusement ... in entertainment” or ​Neil Postman​ (1931-2003) writing in ‘​Amusing Ourselves To Death​’ that “People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” To our endless scrolls and fracturing focus birding offers a vital prescription. Do you remember waiting? Like … just waiting. For 10 seconds. Without grabbing your phone. Birding grows that muscle. And when you nurture it back it feels good, so mentally soothing, that you’ll soon start waiting, looking at a tree or pond or sky, for … 20 seconds? 30? And how about listening. Really listening. Not to headphones but to true three-dimensional deep, rich, luxurious listening to the earth type listening? I forgot I ever did that! Birding grows back that muscle. Hearing birds and insects and water and trees—mmmmmm. It's medicine I didn't even know I needed. Plus, I’ll add these days just the practice of looking at birds—instead of billionaires, influencers, or politicians—is activism. A way to straw-puncture the algorithmically-enhanced plasti-wrap slowly suffocating us and then frantically rip it off to stand up briefly outside the matrix. I met a photographer at the ​Warbler Woods Bird Sanctuary​ in San Antonio last year and he was calmly, serenely, sitting beside a pond … all day. He had his camera and told me the ​MacGillivray’s Warbler​ came to feed every hour or so. He struck me as some kind of enlightened Buddha. Calm, patient, tranquil. I may never get there! But birding nudges us that way.

3. It’s easier than ever

You know how ​John James Audubon​ (1785-1851) used to bird? With a gun. Birds were too far, too fast, too flitty to see in detail. And binoculars weren’t invented until after he died! So he shot them, then studied them, then painted them. His giant painted ‘plates’ served as something like a precursor to Field Guides:

But today? Skip the gun! You don’t technically need anything but it helps to grab binoculars (I recommend ​Nikon Monarch 8x42s​), any local field guide (‘​Birds of Ontario​’ is my best local and ​Sibley's Guides​ are always great ... plus ​J. Drew Lanham​ reminds us used ones from thrift shops are fine!) and, of course, to download the aforementioned totally free and (generously) ad- and sponsor-free apps ​Merlin ID​ and ​eBird​. They’re run by Cornell University (props to ​Cornell​!) and so easy to use. The Merlin app’s newer “Sound ID” feature is often called ‘​Shazam for Birds​’ because you simply press a button and it immediately tells you what birds you can hear right where you’re standing! Like I was standing in Houston last month and pressed this and got this—

I will add that the SoundID is equally helpful at not-clocking those sounds you always thought were birds but maybe aren't. Toads, frogs, bats, raccoons? Been there! Many times. And SoundID is on top of the aforepictured “Bird ID”—that size-and-color feature that helped me ID the Rose-breasted Grosbeak. (Which, btw, is definitely my ‘spark bird,’ a term loosely defined as ‘the bird that gets you into birding.’) eBird also keeps helpful records of every bird you see and acts like the best social media network ever—donation-based with no ulterior motives!—to help you (for example) find the ​Top 100 birders in your hometown​ (congrats ​Alec​—#96!) or the ​Top 100 birders in the world​ (I picture #1 Peter, #2 Steve, and #3 Jürgen as some kinda alterna-​Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson​) and then you can just click people’s names to follow, connect, or reach out to see if they're up for birding. I have met many friends this way! But more on that later.

4. It makes you less speciesist

When I was little I’d heard of sexist (discriminating based on sex) and I’d heard of racist (people yelling “Paki!” at me across the two-lane highway up north when I was visiting my cousin Manju) but I hadn’t yet heard of ageist (discriminating based on age) or ableist (discriminating on ability). And, you know, I’ve been ageist, I’ve been ableist. That’s … sort of how you learn them—through an experience that helps illuminate your own behavior. We’re blind to so much. So much! And to that end birding has helped me become less speciesist. The more time I spend with birds the more I see them as just another creature we share the planet with. We talk, sing, shiver, mate. We nest. We raise young. We hunt for food. They’re just like us. Just trying to make it work, trying to make it alllll work. And you know what? They have! We’ve been here (generously) ​3 million years​. Flying dinosaurs arrived 150 million years ago—but birds? If we want to go by modern definitions? 60 million. Still, that's 20 times longer than us! We were living in trees 3 million years ago. 60 million years ago we ​looked like tree shrews​! So when we see us, our species, prioritizing our quality of life in exchange for absolutely decimating theirs? It hurts. It can’t not hurt. You see the newspaper articles with new proposed megahighways and mourn the swallows who'll need to fly deeper into the night for fewer and fewer insects over fewer and fewer ponds. Or the ​Bobolink​ or ​Eastern Meadowlark​ who are losing their grassland homes as we pave paradise to put up parking lots. (“​They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum, And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them.​”)

Bobolink via ​Birdfact​

Birding inches us closer to the health of the planet. Deep forest breaths or misty mornings on a beach at sunrise. You feel it. Maybe you pick up a bit more litter. Maybe you plant a tree. Maybe you team up with a group of locals to return a fallen juvenile ​Barred Owl​ to its nest high into the trees (as I watched an Audubon Group at ​Mead Botanical Gardens​ do last month). WHO KNOWS WHAT YOU’LL DO! Nobody knows. I feel birding dialing up my admittedly-abysmally-low natural observation, preservation, and kindness towards nature. A wonderful positive externality.

5. Birding minimizes your ego

Related to the above: Birds help reduce our problems to just human. You just think of yourself as less important. In a good way! Say I walk around a park with a pair of binoculars—stepping away from screaming playgrounds and birthday parties with balloons and plastic cups—and, you know, I see … nothing at first. Nothing at first is normal! Then ... I see trees. Then I walk to the trees. Stare into the canopy. Wait a minute. It is hard to wait a minute! But I work on the muscle of waiting a minute. Then an ​American Robin​ flies by—as they’ve been doing for ​hundreds of thousands of years​ before ​we began accidentally started calling them that​—

and that pulls me briefly away from the birthday, from noise, from time. I remember my problems … are species problems. And the wider world has lots of species. This widened outlook has resulted in me becoming more passionate about topics like climate change, ecological health, and conservationism. I’m no pro! Not even close! But I am learning from people like ​J. Drew Lanham​, ​Jonathan Franzen​, and my 92-year-old grandmother-in-law Joan who looks up and writes down notes on every new flower, tree, and bird she sees. By date! In pen! Right in the book! I have been rewarded and enriched by books I would have never heard of nevermind tried to read—like ‘Birds Art Life’ by Kyo MacClear (​3/2019​), ‘My Side of the Mountain’ by Jean Craighead George (​9/2022​), ‘A Sand County Almanac’ by Aldo Leopold (​7/2023​), ‘Reason In A Dark Time’ by Dale Jamieson (​2/2024​), ‘The World Without Us’ by Alan Weisman (​7/2024​), ‘H is for Hawk’ by Helen Macdonald (​2/2025​), or ‘What an Owl Knows’ by Jennifer Ackerman (​3/2025​). Each helps me be a bit less ‘me’—bit more we, bit more us, bit more this. I feel a slight nudge out of the day as my mind explores places a little more ... zoomed out. With distance. With perspective. Bit more wise. Bit more grateful. It's fun gaining a more and more, yes, bird's-eye view. Because then you're suddenly exploring the world from the perspective of birds. And then, on some lucky days, from the forest, from the sun, from the stars.

6. You can do it anywhere

Bird from your couch during commercials in the ​ballgame​. Bird on your walk to school. Bird from the subway to your apartment. From the driveway to the front door. Bird on hills, beaches, mountains, trails. On any work trip? Bird! Any holiday? Bird! Tell you what: Go anywhere on the planet, go to the most remote place you can possibly imagine, and when you arrive ... for sure ... there will be birds. Maybe ​Ivory Gulls​ or ​King Penguins​! But they’ll be there. They’ll be everywhere!

7. It scratches deep list-making tendencies

I have ADHD as do many members of my family, extended family, and friends. Hello! We are welcome here. In fact, birding was almost kind of … made for us? New research suggests ADHD should really be renamed VAST—Variable Attention Stimulus Trait—as neither D in the old definition is correct. We don’t have attention deficit—but rather variable attention. (Some ADHD pals like ​Dan Kwan​ or ​Penn Holderness​ are best hyper-focusers I know!) Birding lends itself to attention oscillation—step-by-step, on an empty beach, following shorebird tracks, waiting for a leaf to rustle, spying a flash of color. That’s superfocus. And, back to the bad definition, we also don’t have “hyperactivity disorder” but, rather, a “stimulus trait”—meaning we require more stimulation. Like our tongues might taste lemon juice as less lemony-sour so we need more lemon juice to taste it as much. You know what’s stimulating? Birds! So birding is incredibly stimulating. Keeping a list, counting species, checking field marks, making notes. “I see something,” somebody will say, and then you both flick your binoculars into the canopy. “Brown cap, streaky yellow breast, bouncing tail.” Somebody will think. Another might fire up Merlin or Sound ID. And then someone says: “Palm Warbler?”

Have you seen a ​Palm Warbler​ before? If not: Lifer! Meaning first time you’ve seen it in your life. New bird to on your life list! There are ​11,086​ bird species in the world and the very top birder has … ​9948​. So you’ll be going a while! (Of course you can simultaneously keep—and the eBird app does this automatically and for free and without ads!—a city / county list, a state / province list, and a country list. Like last week I was in San Antonio and I saw a ​Barred Owl​ in a tree and then a ​Black-bellied Whistling-Duck​ with its young. Here are the pictures I took:

Neither bird was new to me on my Life List but they were both new on my “Texas” list which ticked up to 97.

A couple weeks earlier I was in Dallas and on a late night walk I saw my first ever ​Painted Bunting​ for a few seconds and got a very bad and very blurry picture ... but enough to be sure what it was:

That one was new to me anywhere so my “World Life” list ticked up to 629 that day.

It’s fun! So much fun. Birding deep-scratches your list-making tendencies. I've heard many people say it's like Pokémon GO … but for real.

8. You join a community of bright, eccentric weirdos

Like me. And you. Like us. Look at us! You are 2580 words into an article on birding. Is that normal? Screw normal! “It’s weird not to be weird,” said John Lennon. I agree! These days the pressure to homogenize is stronnnnng. Bright, eccentric weirdos—that’s our jam. As my therapist Gary told me years ago after my divorce when I was struggling to get back out there: “You meet interesting people in interesting places.” Amen! Boggy forests, distant ponds, brambly trails? Pretty interesting! Way off the Tinder circuit. When I’m visiting a city and am keen to slip in a couple hours of birding I google “cityname top 100 ebird”. So if I’m heading to Nashville I type “nashville top 100 ebird” and—

—click the names of people who have set up eBird profiles and email a few people. That’s how I met Graham who picked me up from my hotel before sunrise to go owling (we came up empty but it was fun) and helped me see my first-ever ​Eastern Bluebirds​ and ​Fish Crows​ (like American Crows but with a ​delightfully raspy call)​.

That’s how I met the incredible JC in Jacksonville, the 76-year-old retired Navy Captain who picked me up a big truck and said with a big smile “We’re live free or die people!” We saw 59 species of birds that day including my first ​Boat-tailed Grackles​, ​Sandwich Terns​, and ​Roseate Spoonbills​. JC and I have kept in touch, traded photos, and he helps me ID toughies over text. Check out his ​stunning pictures​! Birding is how I met ​Nick Sweetman​, the graffiti artist who beautifies bridge underpasses with Hooded Mergansers and who I partnered with to turn a 750-square foot wall of brutalist concrete behind a tired subway station into a bright ​painted aviary of local birds​. (Check out our documentary ​here​!)

Birders are people like ​Alie Ward ​(check out her Ologies episodes on ​Pigeons​, ​Crows​, ​and more​), ​J. Drew Lanham​ (the McArthur ‘Genius’ who wrote ‘​Sparrow Envy,​’ ​the astounding Audubon cover feature on ol’ JJ​, and created the YT video “​Rules for the Black Birdwatcher​”), and ​Jonathan Franzen​ (check his National Geographic cover story ‘​Why Birds Matter​’). You can find bird community through places like the ​/birding subreddit​, Facebook’s ‘​What’s This Bird?​’ or ‘​Redpolling​’ pages, or by joining your ​local birding club​. You might start playing ​Wingspan​ or falling into ​Maria Popova's​ astounding and mesmerizing ​bird cards​. I’m saying if you’re a bit odd like us you’ll fit right in! And we’ll be glad to have you. We welcome all people, all types, all spectrums, all abilities. We want you in our world and you are welcome here.

Now!

Okay!

We’re at the end!

You made it through 8 reasons to get into birdwatching.

I could honestly write another 8 … I barely talked about photography or art or the sheer joy of flipping over a triplicate bird calendar on the first day of the new month:

But I won’t!

Instead I will close with just one small point.

I would like to remind you that you already … watch birds.

You do!

Do you not?

Do you not see birds?

Do you not, sometimes, watch them?

You do.

You already are a birdwatcher, technically.

Only thing missing is calling yourself that.

The identity part.

As James Clear writes in ‘​Atomic Habits​,’ “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”

Who do you want to be?

I say it’s time to get over any hesitations!

Skeptical of wearing wide-brimmed tan hats?

Any hat or no hat is fine!

Not sure about the camo or tan pants with 12 pockets?

Any pants or no pants are fine!

I’m here today to tell you that the acceptance, the lean-in, the self-identity?

It is already in you.

Search your feelings.

You know it’s true.

It is time.

It is … your destiny.

Because when you finally see and feel and accept the fact that you are a birder—

—oh it feels so good.

It feels so, so good.

So thank you for reading.

And I'll see you out there.

Oh, and of course, I wish you

Good birding.

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Want more inspiration to begin? J. Drew Lanham's poem “​Sparrow Envy​” will pull you outside.

I don't just write about birds ... I also ​talk about them​!

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Memories of a 94-year-old friend...

Hey everyone,

I grew up without grandparents.

3 of the 4 were dead before I was born and the remaining grandmother—Mata Ji—spoke a different language and lived an ocean away. She gave me my first "Om" necklace and squeezed my hands with loving, watery eyes the few times she visited but when she died in 1996 I felt like I barely knew her.

Maybe I've tried to fill that "grandparent hole" with other wise elders I've come across. Like "Aunt Jane" who was the 94-year-old up the hill from my mother-in-law's cottage. My wife Leslie had just told me she died before I got this text from her son the next morning:

We just had a wonderful ceremony and funeral for her where somebody accidentally called me her son-in-law and I felt myself grow a couple inches. I mean: 94 years old—wow! I saw her hike and swim two times a day, every day, last summer. Heard she did the Wordle in 3 the day before. Housekeeper found her the next morning where she'd apparently died while changing her sweater. Lived alone till the end in the house she raised her five children. Husband of 62 years died a decade ago from cancer.

I replied to her son's text with a few memories below and I thought I'd share them with you, too.

Treasure the elders in your life.

We never know how much time is left.

Aw Andy. I am so sorry. I heard last afternoon. I audibly gasped. My heart did a tilt. My brain and stomach felt momentarily, for a second, unconnected—in a way I've rarely, if ever, felt. She was such a wise woman. 94, right? Wow. And I somehow got so lucky to know her for a blissful 15 of those. To think she was a spritely 79 when we met—doing her backstrokes beside Don every day around the island. I have so many memories and they race across my mind like pictures. Sitting beside her telling her about the ​American Robin​ or ​​White-crowned Sparrow​ I saw on the end of the island—or updating her about the ​Herring Gull​ or ​Turkey Vulture​ nests. Her holding a pencil and telling me how she counts the ​Common Loons​ for nationwide record-keeping purposes. Her flapping red and white flag. I loved her non-fiction in the morning, fiction at night tendencies. I loved that she always had a book. It was sad the day she switched to the e-reader and ​Libby app​ but that was also part of her ability to modernize, stay cutting edge, and confidently embrace the future. I loved her spartan wooden room full of sparkling lake waters and tall skinny pine trees with my kids jumping on the trampoline down below. Her white hydrangeas, orange lilies, purple wildflowers. All filtered through a thick screen haze. In the Don days, maybe there was opera playing. For sure the totem pole cast a glow. One day I asked her about the different sections and she said "Oh, just a minute!" and pulled open a drawer which held a piece of paper she kept specifically to answer that question. "Aunt Jane," as I hilariously knew her, was my wife's mother's father's brother's beautiful wife— wow. She was so deeply and truly awesome. Truly. What a woman. Full of light and a warm learned energy of understanding, respect, solitude. A generous ear. A kind hello. A daily traipse down the rocky slope to the dock. Later with a cane. Then with ski poles. Always in her black one piece swimsuit and, even later, after I almost hit her once in the boat, a bright white swimming cap, purchased within the hour by Mary. I asked her last summer, after she spent a minute climbing up the dock ladder, "How was the swim Aunt Jane?" and she replied right as I finished, right as she sat down in the Muskoka Chair, "Ohhhh, wonnnderful!" Jane seemed like a forest spirit to me. Tall. High up there. Windy, blowing. Full of life, full of energy. Often quiet but so many clever retorts—always wrapped in kindness. The way a forest reflects a deeper mood. In her I also I sensed a rugged individualism. A steadfastness. An always. An every. A reach back to that deeper wisdom. To me, in one spot in my bird-loving heart, she was my favourite bird: ​an owl​. ​Great Horned​ or ​Great Gray​, maybe? Big eyes, full of wisdom—with her beautiful salty-black bowl cut and big round glasses magnifying her eyes. Humans have been here 3 million years. Owls? 60 million. They are apex predators. The only birds with feathered talons for silent travel and forward-facing eyes that penetrate deeply—which goes well with 270-degree neck swivelling and the ability to see behind, and around, corners. Jane. I love you. I miss you. I feel you. I'm near you. Thank you for so many years full of wisdom. I saw you as a distant soul that somehow felt so close. A wonderful nest maker to five inspiring, smart, and exceptionally kind children. To Aunt Jane. With love.

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More reflections on death?

When Leslie's grandmother died ​I wrote this​.

When my friend Chris died ​I wrote this​.

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2000 years of fighting productivity pressures

Hey everyone,

Do you feel like your brain is experiencing a grand quickening? Is the suddenly new ability of everybody being able to type anything into chatGPT and get a perfect picture of it 5 seconds later taking over your group chats too?

I feel you. We got this. As always we can choose our speed. We just have to be more mindful and intentional about it. Walks. ​Phone calls​. Dates. ​Reading​. ​Birding​. Cooking. Buying a magazine. ​Buying a book​.

It was in this spirit that I re-stumbled across a fascinating little history of the human resistance to this grand quickening from 200 BC to today. Maybe this feeling is just ​Lindy​? Or are we experiencing something new?

Take a read and let me know,

Neil

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Excerpt from 'In Praise of Slowness'

Written by Carl Honoré

"On the other side of the Pacific, from its headquarters in San Francisco, the ​Long Now Foundation​ is adding to the groundswell. Its members warn that we are so busy sprinting to keep up with the daily grind that we seldom lift our gaze beyond the next deadline, the next set of quarterly figures. 'Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span,' they say. To make us slow down, to open our eyes to the long view and the big picture, the Foundation is building huge, intricate clocks that tick once a year and measure time over ten millennia [​sponsored by Jeff Bezos​ and carved into a mountain he owns]. The first, a beautiful beast of bronze and steel, is already on display at the Science Museum in London, England. A second, much larger clock will eventually be carved into a limestone cliff near Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada.

Many Long Now supporters work in the technology sector. Danny Hillis, who helped invent supercomputers, is on the board. Among the corporate donors are high-tech giants such as PeopleSoft, Autodesk and Sun Microsystems, Inc. Why are players from the fastest industry on earth backing an organization that promotes slowness? Because they, too, have realized that the cult of speed is out of hand.

Today's pro-Slow organizations belong to a tradition of resistance that started long before the industrial era. Even in the ancient world, our ancestors chafed against the tyranny of timekeeping. In 200 BC, the Roman playwright Plautus penned the following lament:

The Gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish the hours—confound him, too Who in this place set up a sundial To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small pieces!

As mechanical clocks spread across Europe, protest was never far behind. In 1304, Daffyd ap Gwvilyn, a Welsh bard, fumed: 'Confusion to the black-faced clock by the side of the bank that awoke me! May its head, its tongue, its pair of ropes, its wheels moulder: likewise its weights and dullard balls, its orifices, its hammer, its ducks quacking as if anticipating day and its ever restless works.'

As timekeeping wormed its way into every corner of life, satirists poked fun at the European devotion to the clock. In ​Gulliver's Travels ​(1762), the Lilliputians decide that Gulliver consults his watch so often that it must be his god.

As industrialization gathered pace, so, too, did the backlash against clock-worship and the cult of speed. Many denounced the imposition of universal time as a form of slavery. In 1884, Charles Dudley Warner, an American editor and essayist, gave vent to the popular unease, echoing Plautus in the process: 'The chopping up of time intro rigid periods is an invasion of individual freedom and makes no allowances for differences in temperament and feeling.' Others complained that machines were making life too fast, too hectic, less humane. The Romantic movement of artists, writers and musicians that swept across Europe after 1770 was partly a reaction against the modern culture of hustle and bustle, a harking back to a lost idyllic era.

Right through the Industrial Revolution, people sought ways to challenge, restrain or escape the accelerating pace of life. In 1776, the bookbinders of Paris called a strike to limit their working day to fourteen hours. Later, in the new factories, unions campaigned for more time off. The standard refrain was: 'Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will.' In a gesture that underscored the link between time and power, radical unionists smashed the clocks above the factory gates."

These are just 2 out of 282 pages in the phenomenal '​In Praise of Slowness​' by Carl Honoré.

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One of the best ways to fight for your right to slowness at work? ​Cut all meeting time in half​.

Just because you slow down doesn't mean you can't ​get things done​.

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19 Things I Would Tell Myself At Age 19

I'm in advice mood these days!

I've been leaving little notes around the house for my kids—quickly scrawled Sharpie phrases on cue cards—to spur debate and conversation. The last two I wrote this week were "A joke is funny. A prank is mean" and "What comes around goes around." It got me thinking: My kids are little. What would I say to *myself*, if I could, at various younger ages?

Hopefully this is the first in a new series that pairs well with my birthday posts (​43​, ​44​, ​45​!).

Feel free to share a bit of advice you'd give your younger self,

Neil

PS. I don't have any ads, Patreons, or Substacks with "upsell" or "paywall" options. It's just always been word of mouth. Invite like-minded souls to ​join us here​.

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19 Things I Would Tell Myself At Age 19

1. Pull an all-nighter.

2. Befriend a neighbor over 70.

3. Turn off the lights with a friend and listen to 'Kind of Blue.'

4. If you try making good money you usually won't make good stuff but if you try making good stuff you'll usually make good money.

5. Read widely versus narrowly. (Date that way, too.)

6. Learn to put up the Christmas lights.

7. Spend an hour a day outside. For better days, make it two.

8. Email your local politician to argue for a cause.

9. Buy a pair of Nikon Monarchs 8x42s.

10. Get lost in your hometown. If you can't, go to Montréal, Paris, or Tokyo and get lost there.

11. Go see your childhood sports idol play at least once before they retire.

12. Read 'The Fountainhead' by Ayn Rand (694p), 'Siddhartha' by Hermann Hesse (119p), and 'Beyond The Gender Binary' by Alok Vaid-Menon (64p).

13. Learn to make your mom's famous curry.

14. Go on the longest hike, bike, or swim you've ever gone on in your life. (Next year? Do it again.)

15. Before sex: Ask for boundaries and share boundaries.

16. Learn to identify: 5 trees, 5 spices, 5 flowers, 5 accents, 5 birds.

17. Stay open to mind-altering substances but try as late as possible. Best case >27, next >21, next >16.

18. Babysit a niece, nephew, or neighbor. (Bonus points if you change a diaper.)

19. Remember: You have to hit a lot of posts to score a lot of goals.

---

Want some more guidance?

​This is the most surprising advice on success​ I received from a Harvard dean.

And ​Oliver Burkeman​ has ​8 secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life​.

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On our infinite appetite for distraction...

Hey everyone,

I've been thinking a lot lately about '​Infinite Jest​' by David Foster Wallace and its central idea of us being infinitely pleased by endless entertainment. I also like Father John Misty's (much shorter!) song-version '​Total Entertainment Forever​.' In a similar vein the wise ​Mitchell Kaplan​, award-winning bookseller behind the wonderful Florida indie bookstore chain ​Books & Books​, tipped me off years ago to the book '​Amusing Ourselves To Death​' by ​Neil Postman​ (1931-2003). The title once again telegraphs the idea and I'm sharing Neil's masterfully pithy Foreword below.

May we all continue to observe and intentionally turn off our blaring screens. May we continue to read books. May we find steadiness in friendships that have lasted through the slushy slurry storms of today. May we continue to observe the entertainmentification of information for what it is while also— somehow, some way—balancing contemporary whats-happenings with longer, deeper, richer pursuits.

Please enjoy the short 336-word introduction to Neil Postman's 1985 classic '​Amusing Ourselves To Death​.'

Neil

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Amusing Ourselves To Death: Foreword

Written by Neil Postman

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another—slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

---

Postman hits exactly ​how I feel about the algorithm​.

How are we amusing ourselves to death today? Jonathan Haidt goes deep on the dangers of social media in our ​interview on 3 Books​.

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Joy in Dark Times

Hey everyone,

I hope you and your loved ones are healthy these days. Grief comes up in so many ways—so many places. Love and energy to those of you in California. For Leslie and I, we've had a couple friends and family members get challenging diagnoses recently. Grief does seem to help pull what's important to the surface.

Our friend Clare shared she's been finding solace in a book called ​'Wild Hope: Healing Words To Find Light On Dark Days' by Donna Ashworth​ (​@donnaashworthwords​). Leslie bought the book and we loved the first poem Clare texted us which is called 'Joy Chose You.'

I hope it resonates with you too,

Neil

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Joy Chose You

Written by Donna Ashworth

Joy does not arrive with a fanfare
on a red carpet strewn
with the flowers of a perfect life

joy sneaks in
as you pour a cup of coffee
watching the sun
hit your favourite tree
just right

and you usher joy away
because you are not ready for her
your house is not as it should be
for such a distinguished guest

but joy, you see
cares nothing for your messy home
or your bank balance
or your waistline

joy is supposed to slither through
the cracks of your imperfect life
that’s how joy works

you cannot truly invite her
you can only be ready
when she appears
and hug her with meaning
because in this very moment
joy chose you.

---

Here's ​another poem​ that helps me focus on what's most important.

One of the best ways to be ready for joy? ​Practicing gratitude​.

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Forget New Year's resolutions. Do this instead.

Happy New Year!

I hope you had a great 2024 and I'm looking forward to spending time together in 2025.

I know it's January 1st but I admit I'm not much of a New Year's resolution person. They don’t work for me! "Oh, the calendar flipped! Time to start yoga, lose 15 pounds, and stop drinking."

Yeah, right. Too big, too unrealistic! And it's not just me. ​According to the University of Scranton​ only 19% of people actually maintain their New Year’s resolutions and ​US News reports​ that 80% of all resolutions are dropped by February.

So what’s a better way to grow?

Well, it’s not about years. I say it's about months.

And it’s not about massive leaps. To me it's about little improvements. About constantly steering your ship the right direction.

I think a better way to grow is with a monthly dashboard.

What’s a dashboard?

You stare at one every time you start your car. The dashboard flashes signals to make sure your seatbelt is on, your high-beams are off, and you’re going the right speed.

Does the dashboard put your seatbelt on? Hit the brakes for you? No, of course not. You do that. The dashboard just provides real-time feedback to help you course correct along the way.

For the past few years I've written out a monthly dashboard. It’s got four focus areas on 12 things I measure with a green, yellow, or red circle each month. Green means I’m good! Yellow means I’m close. Red means I’m way off.

Part of what’s great about a dashboard is that it allows me to map out all the goals I have bouncing around in my head. ​A study by Gail Matthews​, psychology professor at Dominican University, found that people who write down their goals and dreams on a regular basis are 42% more likely to achieve them. The manifesting effect!

The goal isn't to be perfectly green each month.

It's just to see which areas of my life need focus and then course correct along the way.

And my dashboard isn’t fancy! I write it in marker on a piece of blank paper or in my notebook.

Here’s what my dashboard looked like last month:

The middle is my ikigai. I wrote "Help people live happy lives." An ikigai is your purpose, your high level goal, the reason you get out of bed in the morning. (I talk more about ikigais ​here​ and in Chapter 4 of '​The Happiness Equation​.')

And then outside the ikigai: The top two boxes are what I do. The bottom two are how I do it.

I like the mental image of the bottom boxes actually supporting the top boxes.

So what do I do?

Strong Core

For me the core of my work is writing. So the first two things I measure are publishing one new article (on somewhere like ​CNBC​ or ​HBR​) and writing one chapter of a new book. Writing, writing, writing! And a big way I get ideas into the world is through ​keynote speeches​. That's the 4 speech goal I have each month. Doesn't always happen but last month I was green on all three.

Fastest learning

Next! Learning. What's the fuel for your core? My goals are to stay curious by reading 8 books a month, conducting 2 deep-dive interviews a month, and having 1 new experience a month. I publish my ​Monthly Book Club​ to keep the pressure on the reading. And the interviews? That's why I designed my podcast the way I have—I get to go deep preparing and publishing interviews with people like ​Brené Brown​, ​Jonathan Franzen​, and ​David Sedaris​. And one new experience? Well, that's subjective of course, but it could be anything from putting all my books into the Dewey Decimal system, taking my son to his first Flaming Lips concert, or even just trying a type of cuisine I've never tried. Open ended! And lots of months I miss here. But the goal is to push myself to stay curious and expand.

Best family

This is the box missing from the corporate charts hanging at the office. Your best self starts at home. (I've written about the importance of ​family contracts​ before, too.) For me it means being away from home less than 4 nights a month, having 4 deep airplane-mode Family Days each month, and going on one Family Adventure together. Last month I was traveling a couple weekends which earned me a yellow and red on the dashboard.

Best self

We know how airlines say to put the oxygen mask over your mouth before putting it over your kid's. That would be hard for any parent! But the airlines know something we don’t: we're no good to anyone if we don't take care of ourselves. Best Self means taking care of you. I use an app called ​Trainiac​ to track my workouts, and my goal is to do 4 workouts a week and have 4 longer cardio sessions a week. 16 a month! You can see by all the red circles I didn’t do a great job last month! I hit my workouts (thank you, hotel gyms) but my cardio and Neil's Nights Out (NNOs, discussed in the ​family contract​) took a hit.

So that’s it!

That’s my monthly dashboard.

There are a few things I love about the system.

First, it’s for me, by me. It’s not a hard-and-fast contract. It’s a system of course correction that lets me identify trends and make adjustments to my life. If I miss my cardio three months in a row, it’s time to think: do I need to sign up for hockey? What should I do to get this on track? Or should I just swap this wholesale for something else? Maybe it's time to fold back in meditation, volunteering, or music lessons. But if it’s red just one month, I know it was just a little bump, and I can aim to improve it as I go.

In our fast-paced, frenetic world months are the perfect time where you can roughly scratch out how you’re doing on a dashboard, take a minute to zoom out, and make course corrections along the way.

And as always let's remember:

The goal is not to be perfect here.

It's just to be a little better than before.

Here's to a great 2025!

---

A great way to motivate this kind of monthly action is through ​moonshot goals​.

If you're stuck figuring out what to focus on, think about ​the 3 S's of success​.

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The Very Best Books I Read in 2024

Hey everyone,

Here are the Very Best Books I Read in 2024.

As always the book titles click over to link splitters that take you to links to the library, indie bookstores, and, of course, Barnes & Noble, Indigo, and Amazon. I get zero commissions from any of them. Buy from wherever you like!

Also, here are the Very Best Books I Read in ​2023​, ​2022​, ​2021​, ​2020,​ ​2019,​ ​2018​, and ​2017​, too.

I’ll be back with our “Best Of 2024” episode of ​3 Books​ on the Winter Solstice (December 21!) and my next Book Club in January.

Happy holidays,

Neil

PS. Invite others to join us ​here​.

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20. ​​ADHD IS Awesome: A Guide To (Mostly) Thriving With ADHD​​ by Penn and Kim Holderness. I just read this book ​last month​ and can’t shut up about it. A collection of everything we know about ADHD, written by an ADHD brain, for an ADHD brain. Penn writes that “a typical person with ADHD will have challenges with listening, completing tasks, and keeping track of time (and possessions). They’ll be restless, always ‘on the go’, talkative, and impatient.” Sound like anyone you know? The new ADHD classic.

Perfect for: anyone who thinks they might have ADHD, anyone who loves someone with ADHD, neuroscience and neurodiversity fans…

19. ​Perfume: The Story of a Murderer​ by Patrick Süskind. By far the most sensory book I read this year. I read it in January and can still smell its smells. The book takes place in France in 1738 when “The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots.” He endlessly does this: olfactory yanks you right into a scene. Tells the astounding story of poverty-stricken, nasally-gifted, slumdog-orphan Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from his birth in 1738 to his death in 1766. A zero-to-hero-to-zero-to-I-won't-ruin-the-ending tale that will amaze, disturb, and awe. Good books rattle from the inside. This is a rattler. Sold over 25 million copies before its author ​became a recluse​. (Feel free to skim “the back of the book” via the ​Plot Summary on Wikipedia​ first.)

Perfect for: people who like challenging fiction, nonjudgemental dopamine seekers, anybody who wants to time travel to 1700s France…

PS. ​Celine Song​, filmmaker of ‘​Past Lives​,’ said this was one of her 3 most formative books. Listen to us discuss the book and how she uses sensory deprivation to create chemistry on ​YT​/​Spotify​/​Apple​.

18. ​​Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts​​ by Oliver Burkeman. The perfect “New Year, New You” book for 2025. Oliver reminds us time is finite (“…you’ll never feel fully confident about the future, or fully understand what makes other people tick — and that there will always be too much to do) and reminds us that’s okay—that’s normal! that’s right!—because “being a finite human just means never achieving the sort of control or security on which many of us feel our sanity depends”. He shares 28 short 3-5 page essays meant to be read once a day over four weeks and invites us to approach the book “as a return, on a roughly daily basis, to a metaphorical sanctuary in a quiet corner of your brain, where you can allow new thinking to take shape without needing to press pause on the rest of your life.”

Perfect for: people into healthy cognitive fitness, anyone looking to reduce self-criticism, fans of pithy eloquent wisdom in the vein of ‘The Art of Living’ by Epictetus (​12/2016​)…

PS. ​I interviewed Oliver​ on the Wolf Moon. He gives a writing masterclass and shares the unique way he captures ideas. Listen on ​YT​/​Spotify​/​Apple​.

17. ​​The Long Walk​​ by Stephen King. This is ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy (​​2/2017​​) meets ‘The Hunger Games’ by Suzanne Collins, except written decades before either of those. This book is to those like The Pixies are to Nirvana or Nirvana is to Weezer. It’s a newly reprinted original Richard Bachman from 1979. King wrote it when he was 30. The book takes place in a slightly dystopian near future where 100 sixteen-year-old boys from across the US apply each year to be selected to begin “the long walk” which starts on foot in Maine and ends when there is only 1 boy left. Anybody who stops longer than a couple long pauses is immediately shot and killed and dragged off the road. The whole book is the by turns simple, vulgar, and entrancing conversation between the boys during the walk, all told in a seductive first-person-y third-person following Ray Garraty, pride of Maine, who leaves his girlfriend and gets dropped off by his mom as the book opens. Nothing grotesque in the book! Nothing gruesome, nothing jumping out of the forest. It’s more thrilling than scary.

Perfect for: anyone looking for a beach read, anybody looking to get back into reading, general Stephen King fans or any Stephen King fans who haven’t read the Richard Bachman stuff…

16. ​​The Poet X​​ by Elizabeth Acevédo. A 2018 coming-of-age YA book about a Dominican teen girl in Harlem falling in love, losing and finding God, navigating relationships at home and school, and discovering her poetic voice. Slam-poetry flow with Acevédo’s beautiful voice: “Walking home from the train I can’t help but think Aman’s made a junkie out of me—begging for that hit, eyes wide with hunger, blood on fire, licking the flesh, waiting for the refresh of his mouth. Fiend, begging for an inhale, whatever the price, just so long as it’s real nice—real, real nice—blood on ice, ice, waiting for that warmth, that heat, that fire. He’s turned me into a fiend, waiting for his next word, hanging on his last breath, always waiting for the next next time.”

Perfect for: fans of YA, fans of Nicola Yoon or John Green, and anybody looking to sprinkle a bit of melody into their life…

15. ​Dark Age Ahead​ by Jane Jacobs. The New York Times called Jane Jacobs a “writer and thinker who brought penetrating eyes and ingenious insight to the sidewalk ballet…” and she may be most famous for her 1961 classic ‘​The Death and Life of Great American Cities​.’ This book was written much later—when Jane was 88 in 2006, the last year of her life—and in it she speaks with wisdom about all cultures hitting Dark Ages—from the Roman Empire in the fifth century, to the Islamic Empire in the fifteenth, to ancient Chinese Empires that (I learned) ruled the seas 500 years ago—sending 400-foot long ships holding up to 28,000 (!) sailors to Africa decades before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. “Centuries before the British Royal Navy learned to combat scurvy with rations of lime juice on long sea voyages,” she writes, “the Chinese had solved that problem by supplying ships with ordinary dried beans, which were moistened as needed to make bean sprouts, a rich source of Vitamin C.” But then what? Dark age. New political party halts voyages, dismantles shipyards—skills are lost over generations. She has a powerful refrain: we can’t assume what we have won’t slip away and we need to actively strive to make things better. The five sections are “Families Rigged To Fail,” “Credentialing Versus Educating,” “Science Abandoned,” “Dumbed-Down Taxes,” and “Self-Policing Subverted.”

Perfect for: geography and urban planning folks, anybody looking for a big zoom out from US politics, and fans of perfectly poised writing…

14. ​ A stroll around the world’s most beautiful public spaces​​ by Christopher Beanland. What do I suggest after the dark warnings of our potentially crumbling civilization? A giant coffee table book about parks, of course! “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” sang Joni Mitchell in ‘​​Big Yellow Taxi​​,’ and sometimes walking around Toronto these days you can almost feel the grass screaming. If you live somewhere they’re paving over then this book is like a big breath of fresh air. From ​Central Park​​ in New York to ​​Peace Memorial Park​​ in Hiroshima, this is a striking book full of love and hope.

Perfect for: park lovers, ​Nature Deficit Disorder​-havers, people who wish ​the coffee table book about coffee tables​ was real…

3. ​​Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life​​ by Steve Martin. This is the 2007 memoir by then-62-year-old Steve Martin. With short, tight, punchy sentences Steve tells an honest story of what might seem like a relatively benign life ordering magic tricks out of the back of a magazine and getting a job at the joke shop and, later, having panic attacks on weed and reconnecting with his family. But nothing sounds benign through Steve Martin’s lens. Tightly squeezed, highly concentrated, and double-spaced with lots of photos so the 204 pages feel breezy. Highly recommended.

Perfect for: anyone navigating the inner dynamics of public attention, aspiring stand-up comics, and memoir fans…

12. ​The Sabbath​ by Abraham Joshua Heschel. I grew up in the Toronto suburbs in the 1980s and it was agreed: Sunday was family day, rest day, church day, reflection day. “Gallantly, ceaselessly, quietly man must fight for inner liberty,” writes Abraham Heschel in this slim, 73-year-old interpretation and explanation of the Sabbath, the traditional Jewish day of rest from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. I like the idea. I say bring it back! “Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people.” Yes! A slim 100 pages with a thick, dense, unfurling feeling like some kind of deep-in-the-jungle fern. “The solution of mankind’s most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence from it.” (Pairs well with ‘The Technopoly’ by Neal Postman, which I mention later.)

Perfect for: self-help fans, someone you love who works too hard, anybody interested in using ancient wisdom and history to help with their lives today…

PS. This is one of ​Cal Newport​'s most formative books. You can list to our deep conversation about how he carves out time for rest while still getting things done on ​YT​/​Spotify​/​Apple​.

11. ​​Alphabetical Diaries​​ by Sheila Heti. This is not a book. It is a piece of modern art … wrapped in a book. Sheila Heti, author of ​​​‘​Pure Colour​​’ and ‘​​Motherhood​​,’ typed up 500,000 words from a decade’s worth of journals in rows of Microsoft Excel, kept them all in their original ‘sentence form’ but ignored all paragraphs and dates, then sorted all the sentences … alphabetically, and then carefully took out 90% of them. All that remains is the brave, daring, vulnerable, tender, funny, sexy silhouette-y statue of a young, literary, sensual woman growing up in the city.

Perfect for: ​enlightened bathroom readers​, people who love ‘books as art,’ and general fans of the ​bildungsroman​…

10. ​Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology​ by Neil Postman. A prophetic 30-year-old manifesto about the dangers of pervasive technology that helps illuminate so many of the algorithm and AI conversations we’re having today. The book opens by saying, yes, of course, technology gives us great riches, unfathomable riches, but that it also takes something away. (He excerpts a fascinating ​couple of 95-year-old paragraphs from Freud​.) Postman then says “once a technology is admitted, it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do. Our task is to understand what that design is – that is to say, when we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do it with eyes wide open.” The book was written in 1992 but feels like it was written tomorrow. Casts that wide a timescale. Sample sentence from page 10: “In introducing the personal computer to the classroom, we shall be breaking a four-hundred-year-old truce between the gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word.” A short 199 pages that serves as a flying-through-time-portrait of our historical relationship with technology and potential implications for our cultures, communities, and relationships as we all fly together at warp speed.

Perfect for: reflective tech users, readers of Cal Newport and Jonathan Haidt (see #1), parents worried about ​cell phones in classrooms​…

9. ​​We The Animals​​ by Justin Torres. My friend Jonathan texted me last week saying “Been getting into fiction this year, whole new world for me.” He told me he was listening to ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ (​Best Books of 2023​) and asked what to read next. I suggested this. He wrote back a couple days later: “We the Animals just arrived, excited to dive in this week. Quite the list of mega reviews” and then the next day “Read half last night, will finish today. That there is some fierce raw writing.” Fierce! Raw! Yes, those are the two words that come to mind. A silhouette of three young boys Peter Panning across the sky graces the cover of this debut novel by Justin Torres (b. 1980) which contains nineteen short, unnumbered chapters that hit a near-impossible high bar for pace and electricity. It opens frenetically: “We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.” And doesn’t let up. This is the story of three brothers growing up. You are right there with the boys in fistfights, empty fields, cold basements, and inside sleeping bags on dim polished office floors. Exquisite, haunting, enchanting, lyrical, tough, raw, pure.

Perfect for: fans of evocative fiction, anyone with brothers, and people who like their serious fiction in 100-page instead of 1000-page doses…

8. ​​Figuring​​ by Maria Popova. “How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?” That’s a question that comes up early in this book which ultimately zooms up to tell a fascinating history of arts and science told through deeply engaging and endlessly braided tales of the artists and scientists themselves. They’re not linear stories, though, because as she writes: “Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of ‘biography’ but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams.” Many-sided diagrams astound of people like Johannes Kepler, Maria Mitchell, Rachel Carson, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, told with an entrancing spell of Maria’s particular brand of poetic narrative with endless snips and clips of letters, speeches, and writings weaved in.

Perfect for: fiercely intelligent people, deeply humanist people, and macro-orthogonal thinking science buffs…

PS. ​Maria was my guest​ on 3 Books earlier this year. Listen to our conversation on valuing community over commodification and learn about her 3 most formative books on ​YT​/​Spotify​/​Apple​.

7. ​​Moonbound​​ by Robin Sloan. This is the book I spent the most time with this year. It filled me, and continues to fill me, with so much twinkling rainbow wonder. The feeling of this book is like the front cover image above twisting into a kaleidoscope of images again and again and again. I fell into this book like almost nothing else and I simultaneously had no idea what was going on and couldn’t wait to find out what happened next. Talking beavers. Talking swords! Video games. Wizards, who aren’t really wizards. And the entire book is narrated by a microscopic AI-type chronicler, who’s been in many different lives across the millenniums, but who now sits in our protagonist’s left shoulder. Entrancing as the silence after the cymbal crash. I absolutely loved this book.

Perfect for: fans of ‘Cloud Atlas’ (​6/2019​) by ​David Mitchell​, ‘Star Wars’ supernerds, people with an appetite for Willy Wonka on steroids type imagination…

6. ​​Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How To Finally, Really Grow Up​​ by James Hollis, Ph.D. Average lifespan right now is around 80 years. That means the second half of your life begins on your 40th birthday. Cue the mid-life crisis! Not so fast. Here comes poetically erudite Jungian analyst James Hollis to save you from that. Giant-minded with an in-the-clouds-and-on-the-street tone, this is a masterful l book I know I’ll be revisiting over and over. Hollis opens with a page of questions like “What gods, what forces, what family, what social environment, has framed your reality, perhaps supported, perhaps constricted it?” and “Why do you believe that you have to hide so much, from others, from yourself?” Biggies! Hollis quickly makes the argument that “In the end we will only be transformed when we can recognize and accept the fact that there is a will within each of us, quite outside the range of conscious control, a will which knows what is right for us, which is repeatedly reporting to us via our bodies, emotions, and dreams, and is incessantly encouraging our healing and wholeness.” Magnificent, deep, and soul-touching.

Perfect for: mid-lifers or anyone going through a transition, people who like to chew on deep questions, your friend who collects journals but never knows what to write about in them…

PS. This is one of Oliver Burkeman's (see #18) most formative books! Listen to Oliver talk about Jungian analysis and how Hollis has influenced him on on ​YT​/​Spotify​/​Apple​.

5. ​​The Trial​​ by Franz Kafka. “No one’s got Kafka these days,” Patrick told me a few months back, petting his cat behind the counter at his underground used bookstore mecca ​​Seekers​​. “Can’t keep him in stock. Nobody can. Hits too close to home these days.” Could that be true? No used bookstore in all of Toronto has anything written by the 1883-born Franz Kafka? I figured I had to buy Kafka used but I tried six stores before eventually caving in and going online to ​AbeBooks​. This book is written in 1914 but sounds like a 100-year-in-the-future prophecy of our increasingly ​​low-trust​​ ​​surveillance state​​. First sentence: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K. for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Why? “We are not authorized to tell you that,” say the cops, one of whom, much later, is mercilessly beaten in a courtroom closet. This is a slowly-closing-in-on-all-sides tale of foreboding. Can you imagine being arrested by a remote, inaccessible authority, without your crime being revealed to you? Wonderfully paced, increasingly bleak book that has layers beyond layers and is just begging for a reread.

Perfect for: fans of classic literature, people who like movies that give them skin-crawling anxiety, students of writing…

PS. ​Jonathan Franzen​ talked about his relationship to ‘The Trial’ on 3 Books earlier this year. Listen on ​YT​/​Spotify​/​Apple​.

4. ​​Breath: The New Science Of A Lost Art​​ by James Nestor. I have had this on my beside for three months now. I can’t stop flipping through it. This book is changing my sleep, my energy, my mood. I can’t recommend it enough for anyone interested in improving their body, their health, their vitality. You’ll be looking for your uvula in the mirror to assess your susceptibility for sleep apnea (“the Friedman tongue position scale”), buying mouth tape to tape over your lips at night (Nester recommends ​​3M Nexcare Durapore​​—I’ve been using it for 3 months and love it!), and even looking for tougher foods to chew, while practicing some of the breathholding exercises mentioned later. Read some of my favorite pages ​​here​​.

Perfect for: people who never feel like they get enough sleep, failed meditators who need a more active practice, lovers of smart popular science books…

3. ​Crossroads​ by Jonathan Franzen. The first 400 pages of this book take place over literally one day. One day! And that day is December 23, 1971. That tells you what kind of detail you can expect here. Pulsing, messy, scabrous, erotic, reflective, breath-holdy, shocking, punchy, illuminating. Plot twists! Perfect dialogue! We follow the Hildebrandts—father Russ, mother Marion, four kids ranging from college-age Clem to high school social queen Becky to drug-dealing teen Perry to little, almost invisible Judson—as they navigate complex inner-outer lives around their church in the fictional small town of New Prospect, Illinois. Every chapter gives each character’s unique perspective and backstory until the slow-pounding 200-page fireworks display at the end. The characters might be dark—but there’s a humanity, a beauty, an inner-inner life, that Franzen exposes like almost nobody else writing today. ‘Crossroads’ will take you far, far away. A book to help us stare slack-jawed at something in ourselves while adding some taffy and fillings to the human experience.

Perfect for: anyone who enjoys family dramas, Franzen fans who liked ‘​The Corrections​’ or ‘​Freedom​’ but missed this one, people who like falling into 600-page novels…

2. ​​The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing​​ by Melissa Bank. I never would have guessed at the beginning of 2024 that my favorite novel this year would be a coming-of-age romantic and sexual awakening first-person narrative from a snappy, turbo-charged Jersey-girl-turned-New Yorker through the 80s and 90s. But I loved it. A funny, fast-paced, emotionally sumptuous read with strong ‘​​When Harry Met Sally​​’ vibes throughout. Melissa Bank writes with a magical Claire Keegan (‘Foster,’ ​​9/2023​​) brand of writing I’d call “vivid sparsity.” The story is told through seven short stories that leapfrog through Jane Rosenal’s life with a wild unpredictability that feels like real life. An astounding life portrait told with speed, precision, zingers, and a rare three-dimensionalization. What a stunning voice!

Perfect for: people who like the fast paced funny-romantic feel of ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ fans who like ​Amy Einhorn​ books like ‘The Help’ or ‘Big Little Lies,’ people who want to live a whole life in a few hours…

1. ​​The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness​​ by Jonathan Haidt. A deeply clear, deeply researched, deeply, dare I say, obvious clarion call for no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, entirely-phone-free schools, and a callback to open play for our kids instead of programmed safe-robot childhoods. (There’s even a three-page photo spread on ​​old, dangerous playground equipment​​ which was speaking my love language.) Get ready to smash your router with a hammer and take your kids to the park after reading how our social interactions have, for millions of years, been embodied, synchronous, one-to-one or one-to-several, with a high bar for entry or exit. Whereas now we have slathered ourselves so deeply digital that social relationships have become disembodied, asynchronous, one-to-many, with a low bar for entry and exit. No wonder we are lonely! (Which is, no biggie, ​​worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day​​, according to ​this report​ from Surgeon General ​​Vivek Murthy​​.) Tightly written, endlessly punctuated with charts, with every chapter nicely summarized with a perfect bullet point one-pager, this book is designed for max skimmability. You could honestly just flip past the 100 graphs and get the story. A rallying cry and anti-tech manifesto which offers new ways of living that look an awful lot like old ways of living. Here is ​​part one of my highlights​​ and here is ​​part two​​. This book came out March 26, 2024 and in tomorrow’s December 8, 2024 ​New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller list​ the book is #6 with now 35 straight weeks on the list. In other words: WE HAVE LIFTOFF! Let’s keep pushing the movement forward. There’s a wonderful ​resource-filled site​ for the book, ​a phone-free school kit​, a ​partnership with Dr. Becky​ to ‘free the anxious generation,’ and you can read up on what you can do as a ​parent​, ​teacher​, ​legislator​, and ​more​.

Perfect for: teachers and principals, parents of teens and pre-teens, and anyone worried about the unprecedented interference of technology…

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Hermann Hesse on the Wisdom of Trees

Hey everyone,

I am trying to grow my zoom-out muscle. My looking at my life from far away muscle. I want to pull back against what the world pushes us towards—short! buzzy! trending!—and instead try and see more, do less, and remember the big things.

This is why I have a "rock clock" on my dresser: a little row of four smooth rocks pushed forward (for the four decades I've lived so far) and six rocks left pushed back (for the six decades I hope to live). I was inspired by the ​Clock of the Long Now​ which dongs once a year for 10,000 years. No matter what stresses I encounter during the day the rock clock is a reminder of the problem's teeny-tiny-ness relative to this broader decade. So maybe not worth stressing about?

I read a little excerpt by Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) recently that gave me this feeling. It's a poetic piece and I get something different out of it every time. These few paragraphs from Hesse's 1920 book 'Wandering' ultimately offers us a way of looking at ourselves as "life from eternal life" and reminds us to trust we are part of much bigger things—things we can't ever see—and so our most noble mission is simple being our truest selves.

Let's keep pulling back from the instant, the now, into our bigger and larger selves.

And may you see or touch a tree with love today.

Neil

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The Wisdom of Trees

Written by Hermann Hesse

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.

In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.

Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured.

And every young farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says:

A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says:

My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us : Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts.

Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning.

It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts : Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them.

But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

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Spending time with the trees has ​science-backed benefits​, too.

If you're heading to the woods, ​check out this interview with J. Drew Lanham​ to get excited about meeting the birds.

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Oliver Burkeman's eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life

Hey everyone,

Oliver Burkeman is one of my favorite self-help writers. He takes a genre that can sometimes be full of pow-zam schlockiness and crafts it into something poetic and literary and deeply meaningful.

​​Oliver is our guest​ in Chapter 142​ of 3 Books (​Apple​/​Spotify​/​YT​), which just dropped on last Friday's full moon, but he's been an influence on me for many years. In 2010 he ​wrote about my blog 1000 Awesome Things​ in his fifteen-year(!)-running Guardian column "​​This Column Will Change Your Life​."

The very last column he wrote for The Guardian on September 4, 2020 is one I return to again and again. It's a deeply felt collection of timeless wisdom. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do and if you want to go deeper into Oliver's stuff check out his books '​Four Thousand Weeks​' and '​Meditations for Mortals​.'

Enjoy this beautiful week,

Neil

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The Eight Secrets to a (Fairly) Fulfilled Life

Written by Oliver Burkeman

In the very first instalment of my column for the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, a dizzying number of years ago now, I wrote that it would continue until I had discovered the secret of human happiness, whereupon it would cease. Typically for me, back then, this was a case of facetiousness disguising earnestness. Obviously, I never expected to find the secret, but on some level I must have known there were questions I needed to confront – about anxiety, commitment-phobia in relationships, control-freakery and building a meaningful life. Writing a column provided the perfect cover for such otherwise embarrassing fare.

I hoped I’d help others too, of course, but I was totally unprepared for how companionable the journey would feel: while I’ve occasionally received requests for help with people’s personal problems, my inbox has mainly been filled with ideas, life stories, quotations and book recommendations from readers often far wiser than me. (Some of you would have been within your rights to charge a standard therapist’s fee.) For all that: thank you.

I am drawing a line today not because I have uncovered all the answers, but because I have a powerful hunch that the moment is right to do so. If nothing else, I hope I’ve acquired sufficient self-knowledge to know when it’s time to move on. So what did I learn? What follows isn’t intended as an exhaustive summary. But these are the principles that surfaced again and again, and that now seem to me most useful for navigating times as baffling and stress-inducing as ours.

There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating. Today more than ever, there’s just no reason to assume any fit between the demands on your time – all the things you would like to do, or feel you ought to do – and the amount of time available. Thanks to capitalism, technology and human ambition, these demands keep increasing, while your capacities remain largely fixed. It follows that the attempt to “get on top of everything” is doomed. (Indeed, it’s worse than that – the more tasks you get done, the more you’ll generate.)

The upside is that you needn’t berate yourself for failing to do it all, since doing it all is structurally impossible. The only viable solution is to make a shift: from a life spent trying not to neglect anything, to one spent proactively and consciously choosing what to neglect, in favour of what matters most.

When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness. I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist ​James Hollis​ for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” We’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. You tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth. (Relatedly, don’t worry about burning bridges: irreversible decisions tend to be more satisfying, because now there’s only one direction to travel – forward into whatever choice you made.)

The capacity to tolerate minor discomfort is a superpower. It’s shocking to realise how readily we set aside even our greatest ambitions in life, merely to avoid easily tolerable levels of unpleasantness. You already know it won’t kill you to endure the mild agitation of getting back to work on an important creative project; initiating a difficult conversation with a colleague; asking someone out; or checking your bank balance – but you can waste years in avoidance nonetheless. (This is how social media platforms flourish: by providing an instantly available, compelling place to go at the first hint of unease.)

It’s possible, instead, to make a game of gradually increasing your capacity for discomfort, like weight training at the gym. When you expect that an action will be accompanied by feelings of irritability, anxiety or boredom, it’s usually possible to let that feeling arise and fade, while doing the action anyway. The rewards come so quickly, in terms of what you’ll accomplish, that it soon becomes the more appealing way to live.

The advice you don’t want to hear is usually the advice you need. I spent a long time fixated on becoming hyper-productive before I finally started wondering why I was staking so much of my self-worth on my productivity levels. What I needed wasn’t another exciting productivity book, since those just functioned as enablers, but to ask more uncomfortable questions instead.

The broader point here is that it isn’t fun to confront whatever emotional experiences you’re avoiding – if it were, you wouldn’t avoid them – so the advice that could really help is likely to make you uncomfortable. (You may need to introspect with care here, since bad advice from manipulative friends or partners is also likely to make you uncomfortable.)

One good question to ask is what kind of practices strike you as intolerably cheesy or self-indulgent: gratitude journals, mindfulness meditation, seeing a therapist? That might mean they are worth pursuing. (I can say from personal experience that all three are worth it.) Oh, and be especially wary of celebrities offering advice in public forums: they probably pursued fame in an effort to fill an inner void, which tends not to work – so they are likely to be more troubled than you are.

The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it. As the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics understood, much of our suffering arises from attempting to control what is not in our control. And the main thing we try but fail to control – the seasoned worriers among us, anyway – is the future. We want to know, from our vantage point in the present, that things will be OK later on. But we never can. (This is why it’s wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain; it’s just that we’re currently very aware of it.)

It’s freeing to grasp that no amount of fretting will ever alter this truth. It’s still useful to make plans. But do that with the awareness that a plan is only ever a present-moment statement of intent, not a lasso thrown around the future to bring it under control. The spiritual teacher ​Jiddu Krishnamurti​ said his secret was simple: “I don’t mind what happens.” That needn’t mean not trying to make life better, for yourself or others. It just means not living each day anxiously braced to see if things work out as you hoped.

The solution to imposter syndrome is to see that you are one. When I first wrote about how useful it is to remember that ​everyone is totally just winging it​, all the time, we hadn’t yet entered the current era of leaderly incompetence (Brexit, Trump, coronavirus). Now, it’s harder to ignore. But the lesson to be drawn isn’t that we’re doomed to chaos. It’s that you – unconfident, self-conscious, all-too-aware-of-your-flaws – potentially have as much to contribute to your field, or the world, as anyone else.

Humanity is divided into two: on the one hand, those who are improvising their way through life, patching solutions together and putting out fires as they go, but deluding themselves otherwise; and on the other, those doing exactly the same, except that they know it. It’s infinitely better to be the latter (although too much “assertiveness training” consists of techniques for turning yourself into the former).

Remember: the reason you can’t hear other people’s inner monologues of self-doubt isn’t that they don’t have them. It’s that you only have access to your own mind.

Selflessness is overrated. We respectable types, although women especially, are raised to think a life well spent means helping others – and plenty of self-help gurus stand ready to affirm that kindness, generosity and volunteering are the route to happiness. There’s truth here, but it generally gets tangled up with deep-seated issues of guilt and self-esteem. (Meanwhile, of course, the people who boast all day on Twitter about their charity work or political awareness aren’t being selfless at all; they are burnishing their egos.)

If you’re prone to thinking you should be helping more, that’s probably a sign that you could afford to direct more energy to your idiosyncratic ambitions and enthusiasms. As the Buddhist teacher ​Susan Piver observes​, it’s radical, at least for some of us, to ask how we’d enjoy spending an hour or day of discretionary time. And the irony is that you don’t actually serve anyone else by suppressing your true passions anyway. More often than not, by doing your thing – as opposed to what you think you ought to be doing – you kindle a fire that helps keep the rest of us warm.

Know when to move on. And then, finally, there’s the one about knowing when something that’s meant a great deal to you – like writing this column – has reached its natural endpoint, and that the most creative choice would be to turn to what’s next. This is where you find me. Thank you for reading.

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I'm not the only one who loves Oliver's work. Our guest in Chapter 28 of 3 Books, ​Mark Manson​, said "Oliver Burkeman has a way of giving you the most unexpected productivity advice exactly when you need it" and our guest in Chapter 135, ​Cal Newport​, said "More than a book of ideas, Meditations for Mortals offers a practical path toward personal transformation – one that helps you sidestep the shallow allure of frenetic busyness and find a liberating joy in the limits and imperfections of life. A must-read." Don't miss more of ​Oliver's potent wisdom​ in Chapter 142 of 3 Books.

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A few thoughts on gratitude...

Hey everyone,

Happy morning after the U.S. election.

I'm writing this before knowing who won and feeling slightly worried about the state of things.

But, you know, that's also where gratitude comes in. I've been writing about gratitude since I began my list of ​1000 Awesome Things​ way back in 2008. I don't think I knew it so obviously then. Maybe it will help to start with a definition. I like what ​Robert Emmons​ (b. 1958), University of California gratitude researcher and author of '​The Little Book of Gratitude​,' says:

Living gratefully begins with affirming the good and recognizing its sources. It is the understanding that life owes me nothing and all the good I have is a gift...

I like that! Let's start there. "All the good I have is a gift." If we start there then we pretty quickly can start feeling grateful ... for everything else. I'm lucky to be writing this. You're lucky to be reading it. We're lucky underground wires and flying satellites are letting us have this conversation. Lucky our eyeballs work! Lucky they can convert pixel streaks into thoughts! Never mind how lucky we both are to even have the time to chat like this.

Emmons calls gratitude "fertilizer of the mind" which helps to "spread connections and improve function in nearly every realm of experience." He said six years ago in 2018 in a "​Science of Gratitude" paper​ that "Research suggests that gratitude inspires people to be more generous, kind, and helpful (or “prosocial”); strengthens relationships, including romantic relationships; and may improve the climate in workplaces." And even earlier than that, in 2013, on ​Daily Good​ he said that "grateful people are more resilient to stress, whether minor everyday hassles or major personal upheavals." This all makes sense! When we're focused on the positive the negative doesn't make as much of a mental clang.

Of course, my own attempts at gratitude are much smaller. Pithier! I started writing one "awesome thing" a day on June 20, 2008 and I ... never stopped. Over 150,000 people still read my new daily awesome thing (​you can sign up here​) and a few recent ones include "Getting late to hockey but making it on the ice in time," "When someone compliments your glasses," and "The smell of warm clothes when you open the dryer."

I'm a court jester next to the wise, sagacious Mary Oliver (1935-2019), though. I have posted poems of hers before like "​Don't Hesitate​" and "​The Sun​" and while writing this I came across "​Messenger​" which is a new fave:

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

To close off I dug up a book called, fittingly, '​Gratitude​' by Oliver Sachs (1933-2015), the British neurologist and naturalist perhaps most famous for writing the book that became the movie ​Awakenings​.

I like this quote:

There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death. I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

I love that. "An intercourse with the world." Maybe that's what gratitude is ... just having that (uh) daily world intercourse. Where you see the bugs and the flowers and the birds and the trees and the smiles and the sunsets and, well, all of it, as a wondrous gift.

Can we live in that mindset all the time? No! Of course not. But that's why we have these conversations—these re-visitings—to just help keep steering ourselves slowly back to awe.

We are very grateful to be here. I am grateful for your love and energy along the way.

Thanks, as always, for being here. And you can invite others into our community ​here​.

Neil

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Is ​this​ the most famous gratitude letter of all time?

​Here's​ a two-minute way to practice gratitude each day.

Take a deep breath - Excerpt from from 'Breath' by James Nestor

Hey everyone,

I suddenly can't shut up about the book '​Breath​' by James Nestor. I have so many dog-eared pages, so many highlights. Basically I've realized that me and maybe half of us are breathing completely wrong. I'll share my full review on Saturday, but for now I wanted to leave you with the book's Epigraph which is from a 2500-year-old stone inscription in China.

Take a deep breath, read it slowly, and ask yourself if you feel you can breathe better. Check out the book ​here​ and make sure you're on my book club mailing list ​here​.

Neil

In transporting the breath, the inhalation must be full. When it is full, it has big capacity. When it has big capacity, it can be extended. When it is extended, it can penetrate downward. When it penetrates downward, it will be come calmly settled. When it is calmly settled, it will be strong and firm. When it is strong and firm, it will germinate. When it germinates, it will grow. When it grows, it will retreat upward. When it retreats upward, it will reach the top of the head. The secret power of Providence moves above. The secret power of the Earth moves below. He who follows this will live. He who acts against this will die.

—500 BCE Zhou Dynasty stone inscription

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Want to harness your breathe to help you meditate but afraid of doing it wrong? Learn the three biggest myths about meditation ​here​.

Did you know that trees release phytoncides, chemicals that can reduce adrenaline and cortisol in your body? Practice your deep breathing and ​take a walk in nature​.

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More birthday wisdom from readers...

I started publishing a list of advice on my birthday. I did it when I turned ​43​, ​44​, and last week when I turned ​45​. The post last week went wildly viral with over 400,000 people reading it. And now, most excitingly, I'm seeing so many others writing and sharing their own lists back.

"I'm a Mum of 3 awesome kids and call Sydney, Australia home," Ness Quayle wrote to me last week. "When I was 9, I tragically lost my father. He was 42 years young. A few days ago, I turned 42 and my daughter, Ella, is 9. The significance of these ages has stirred a number of emotions in me for a number of months. What if I were to pass away? What would my kids remember of their Mother or me as a woman?"

I relate to this feeling. Not fear exactly but—the human desire to etch ourselves into the stone a little bit? To feel like carving coherence in the blur of inchoate motion. Ness continues: "Writing this list was cathartic, as I desire to share with my kids my ideas, thoughts, and values. To preserve my voice in some small way, just in case, so they can refer to it at any time throughout their life. I highly recommend everyone giving this a red hot go!"

So do I! And now, without further ado, here are wonderful lists of birthday advice from Ness, Meredith, Christine, Michelle, and Sera.

Neil

P.S. Do you have a list of advice inside you? Please reply and share it with me or, as Ness says, give it a red hot go!

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42 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 42

Written by Ness Quayle

1. You’re never fully dressed without a smile or eyeliner.

2. Don’t water a garden you don’t want to grow.

3. Marmalade and vegemite on toast. It’s salty, sweet deliciousness.

4. Pay attention to what you pay attention to.

5. “Talk less, smile more” (Hamilton) when dealing with narcissists.

6. Ask for help from your mates and spiritual guides, they’ll always step up.

7. Call over text. It means a lot.

8. Keep going.

9. Prioritising my nervous system response has changed my dating life.

10. Sleepovers with besties are magic.

11. Farting in front of my kids is hilarious.

2. Build muscle. It won’t make you bulky.

13. Laughter, sunlight, and 2 minute dance breaks are medicine for the soul.

14. Take photos and then put away the phone.

15. Always bring food to school pickups.

16. Slowing down each inhale and exhale immediately changes your state.

17. Start with the end in mind but don’t be too attached to the outcome. (It’s who you become on the journey that matters.)

18. Talk to strangers; they’re genuinely very receptive and kind.

19. Inner child work is essential work.

20. Experiences over things. Actions over words.

21. Never leave home without a water bottle.

22. There’s no such thing as one-way liberation.

23. Friends can help heal a heart they didn’t break.

24. Per aspera ad astra…Through adversity to the stars ✨

25. Always commit to a Fancy Dress party. The joy of dressing up is contagious.

26. Record your kids voices, laughter, and opinions. It’s glorious looking back.

27. Afternoon naps and spicy margaritas are heaven-sent.

28. Slowing down gets you there faster, and in better shape.

29. Genuine curiosity is so damn attractive.

30. Cut multiple keys to your front door and remember where you’ve hidden them.

31. Use the line “by the end of this chat, I hope there’s greater understanding between us” before starting a difficult conversation.

32. I firmly identify as Ness. Not Vanessa.

33. Attend live events. A collective, shared human experience is so powerful.

34. Playing handball regularly with my kids has been game-changing for our relationship.

35. Travel solo.

36. If you can’t find time to meditate for 5 minutes, you need 10.

37. Demonstrate to your kids what relaxation and a wholehearted apology looks like.

38. One day, this will all make sense.

39. Watching ​Graham Norton on YouTube​ always improves my mood. 40. You are not your thoughts. You are the observer of your thoughts. 41. Sunrise is the best part of the day.

42. “Keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.” (Max Ehrmann)

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3o Things I’ve (Almost) Learned As I Turn 30

Written by Sera Ertan

1. Dream bigger than what you think is possible.

2. Have that slice of cake and glass of wine.

3. Always find a reason to celebrate life.

4. If you think you can pull it off, wear it.

5. Explore dating outside of your type.

6. To stretch time and add years to your life, go somewhere you have never been.

7. Let strangers become friends and genuinely listen to their stories, you will be surprised by how much anyone can teach you.

8. Sun and sea might be enough to cure your depression.

9. If you are unhappy, move, you are not a tree.

10. Everything has a solution when you allow yourself to think outside the box.

11. Express your emotions, life is too short not to tell people to fuck off.

12. Stop caring about what others will think about you, nobody is thinking about you.

13. Let your intuition guide you, or you will resent the life you live.

14. Do not overcomplicate life.

15. There is always more to learn, be open to new knowledge and accept the fact that you know very little.

16. Experiment and choose the diet that works best for your body, don’t let vegans (or anyone extreme for that matter), convince you otherwise.

17. Weight all opinions, but make your own decision.

18. Take the risk, and watch life support you.

19. Do more of what brings you peace.

20. Create your own workout regimen and stick to it.

21. Don’t get bogged down by the past and the future, stay in touch with the present moment.

22. Focus only on your very next step.

23. Learn a new skill every year.

24. Remember that you are free to recreate yourself and become a completely new person any moment you want.

25.Be fully yourself around people and let whoever wants to leave leave.

26. Call your mom and dad more often.

27. Where you are is where you are meant to be.

28.You set your own limits.

29. Stay curious and embrace change.

30. Enjoy the ride.

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60 Life Lessons Learned In 60 Years

Written by Michelle Oram

1. Don’t put a wool sweater in the washing machine if you ever want to wear it again.

2. You can take a 2-week trip with just a carry-on.

3. Drying laundry outdoors saves money, makes your clothes last longer—and they will smell oh so good!

4. Homemade soup is the best comfort food.

5. Don’t postpone happiness. Enjoy today because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.

6. Avoid depending on other people to make you happy. True happiness comes from within.

7. Find things to love about yourself. If you’re not happy with yourself, you’re not ready for a relationship.

8. Being a mom is hard sometimes, but it’s so worth it.

9. When your kids grow up and leave home, you’ve done your job of raising them to be independent adults.

10. Our family stories matter so we need to share them.

11. True friendships stand the test of time and distance.

12. If there’s something you want to do, just do it. That way you’ll never have to ask, “What if?”

13. The real learning starts after you leave school.

14. There’s always something new to learn, and you’re never too old to learn it.

15. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do anything. Tune out the naysayers.

16. Do your homework and form your own opinions.

17. Be satisfied with progress instead of seeking perfection.

18. Choose your own success criteria rather than measuring your success by the standards or actions of others.

19. Don’t buy more house than you need. In fact, don’t buy more of anything than you need.

20. Always set some money aside for emergenceis because rainy days will come.

21. Get into the habit of saving early in life and save as much as you can.

22. Pay off debt as quickly as possible.

23. Health will always be more important than money.

24. Trust your instincts when if comes to your health. If something doesn’t feel right, look into it.

25. How you feel matters more than how you look.

26. You don’t need to be an athlete, or even have athletic ability, to live an active lifestyle. There’s a lesson I wish I’d learned before high school gym class.

27. Exercise gives you energy.

28. Getting outdoors every day boosts your mood and increases creativity. And it makes winter bearable.

29. Material possessions aren’t the key to happiness. You can be happy with very little.

30. Quality over quantity in all things.

31. Take time to appreciate the simple, everyday pleasures.

32. Appreciate what you already own rather than yearning for the next thing.

33. Don’t get sucked into FOMO. There will always be someone with bigger, better, or more things than you have.

34. A handwritten note will make your day…or someone else’s.

35. You don’t really need the latest and greatest of anything.

36. Schedule downtime in your calendar.

37. Your age doesn’t define you.

41. Be grateful for the privilege of growing older.

42. Choosing to age gracefully is liberating.

43. Laughter really is the best medicine.

44. It doesn’t matter what other people think of you.

45. Don’t get sucked into negativity.

46. Kindness costs nothing.

47. Be authentic.

48. Music makes everything better.

49. Strong faith makes life’s troubles easier.

50. You can count on your faith community in difficult times.

51. Volunteer. You’ll get back more than you give.

52. Giving to others feels good.

53. The people you work with and the relationships you form matter as much as the work you do.

54. It’s okay to change direction and choose a different career path.

55. Your career is just one aspect of your life. Keep it in perspective.

56. Fully disconnect during your vacation time. No matter your role, work will survive without you.

57. Retirement is a beginning, not an end.

58. Make time to do things that make you happy.

59. If something matters enough to you, you’ll find time for it.

60. Finally, the years will fly by. I don’t quite believe I’m turning 60 and often wonder where the years have gone. In my head I’m still 18. That’s why it’s important to enjoy every day and not take life for granted.

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46 Things I’ve (Almost) Learned As I Turn 46

Written by Christine Da Silva

1. My happiness is my responsibility.

2. Take care of your health before it becomes your mental illness.

3. No response is a powerful response.

4. Sometimes things don’t get easier, you just get stronger.

5. Always listen to your intuition, even if it scares you.

6. Teachers don’t know everything. Mine told me spelling was important and that I’d never carry a calculator in my pocket.

7. Expect nothing and you will never be disappointed.

8. Being a mom is only a small part of who I am.

9. Actions need to match effort.

10. Some people come into your life when you need them, they don’t always need to stay.

11. I am, always have been and always will be enough.

12. My deepest wounds did not come from my enemies.

13. You are never too old.

14. It is never too late.

15. Peanut butter cups taste way better frozen.

16. Real queens fix each others’ crowns.

17. When you see something, you like in someone tell them.

18. I don’t have time is a bullshit excuse.

19. A Stop Doing list is just as important as a To Do list.

20. Music is so much better at full blast with the windows down.

21. My alone time is for your safety.

22. I survived all the days I thought I wouldn’t.

23. Pictures will become more important, get in them.

24. Some people don’t deserve an explanation.

25. No one is making it out of here alive.

26. I would rather have your time then your money.

27. “No” is a complete sentence.

28. Just one more page/chapter is the biggest lie I tell myself most often.

29. Your opinion of me is none of my business.

30. The glass isn’t half full or half empty, its refillable.

31. If they want to they will.

32. Always choose happiness over history.

33. I am not my thoughts; I am the watcher of them.

34. Lessons repeat themselves until you learn them.

35. There is always light after darkness.

36. My children have taught me more than anyone else.

37. The universe will whisper to you until she needs to scream to get your attention.

38. The secret to happiness is to always have a vacation booked.

39. My boundaries only bother those who don’t respect me.

40. Theres always 3 sides to every story, your side, their side, and the truth…or the screenshots.

41. Somethings are not worth the jail time.

42. Getting older is better than the alternative.

43. What you allow will continue.

44. I am forever learning.

45. Nothing changes if nothing changes.

46. Eat the damn cake!

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48 Things I Learned As I Turned 48

Written by Meredith Foxx

1. You’re never fully dressed without lipstick (or for that matter blush).

2. Sleep is underrated.

3. It’s okay to say NO.

4. Teach yourself to stop ruminating.

5. The “wait 24 hours before sending an email” works.

6. No need to photograph everything.

7. You can break a bad habit (i.e. diet coke)

8. Better to be overdressed than underdressed.

9. Know your city officials.

10. Know your neighbors.

11. Don’t be afraid to ask people questions about themselves.

12. Listen to songs that remind you of your past & good times you have had. (Neil Diamond-

High School).

13. It’s okay to be a tourist in a new city- explore.

14. Accept compliments & criticism.

15. Have a actual key to your house.

16. Learn Brevity.

17. Get up and move/walk during a workday (preferably outside).

18. Stop overbuying groceries- wasteful.

19. Try clothes on before you buy them.

20. All couples should have to put a piece of furniture together- you learn a lot.

21. Reading is true joy.

22. Recognizing others for their accomplishments is underrated.

23. Stop using the word “just”.

24. If you don’t like the book- stop reading it.

25. Handwritten thank you notes & sympathy cards are meaningful- take the time.

26. Stop wishing time away.

27. If you don’t want to go- don’t go.

28. If you don’t like the product, throw it out (skin, hair, makeup). It’s a sunk cost.

29. Priorities change-that is okay.

30. Not all stress is bad.

31. Have a will.

32. Just like sending an email-wait 24 hours before purchasing everything in your “online”

cart.

33. Throw away clothes that are worn.

34. Hungry and being temperature hot is a bad combination.

35. Petting your dogs (or pets) always will make you happy.

36. Don’t be afraid of preventative health screenings-get them done.

37. Rewatch your favorite movies as a kid (For me: Sound of Music & The Wizard of Oz)

38. Don’t wait to use stuff- use it.

39. You don’t have to clean your plate.

40. Always pack a toothbrush, toothpaste, tissues, spare undergarments and socks in your

carry on.

41. Keep traditions and make new ones.

42. Learn when to be quiet.

43. Don’t let your low fuel light come on in the car.

44. Get a car wash.

45. Be humble.

46. Be kind.

47. Be patient.

48. Be forgiving

And for 45-48- of others and yourself.

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Read more of my birthday advice...

​45 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 45​

​44 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 44​

​43 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 43​

...And then write your own and share with me!

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45 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 45

Hey everyone,

Today is my birthday! And with it comes my usual dose of completely unrequested advice. As always, take what works, ditch what doesn't! And if you'd like to read the first two editions of this series here is my "​43 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 43​" and "​44 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 44​."

Let me know which ones you like, didn't like, or any suggestions for next year!

Neil

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45 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 45

1. Slice the bagels before you freeze them.

2. Every time you’re talking about someone pretend they’re standing right behind you.

3. If you don’t love the pants at the store you’ll hate them at home.

4. Before you move in together: travel.

5. Motivation does not cause action. Action causes motivation.

6. If you’re talking on the phone and you’re on the toilet—flush later.

7. Airport Rule: Farther the walk cleaner the bathrooms.

8. What costs nothing but is exceedingly rare and valuable? Eye contact.

9. Money does buy happiness if you buy 1 of 3 S’s: Social (going out with friends), Sweat (joining a team), Skill (taking a class).

10. Wait a day before replying to an email that makes you angry. (You can always tell them to go to hell tomorrow.)

11. Never take something you've never taken before doing something you've never done.

12. Best and bestseller are not the same thing.

13. Relationship Tip: Find someone who laughs at your jokes and someone whose jokes you laugh at.

14. Many people wish they had one more kid. Few people wish they had one less kid.

5. “No” is a complete sentence.

16. “I failed med school” is fact, “I failed my parents” is story, “I’m addicted to booze” is fact, “I’ve ruined my life” is story, “I’m going bald” is fact, “I’ll never get married” is story. For better self-talk peel stories off facts.

17. In an era of endless choice the value of curation skyrockets.

18. Before renovating: Mentally double the price and double the time. Then, if you’d still do it, do it.

19. Fat doesn’t make you fat. Sugar makes you fat.

20. When investing with friends assume it's gone.

21. At holiday meals: Let the family member with the youngest child choose the dinner time.

22. Pay attention to what you pay attention to.

23. Public speaking tip: If you want praise, ask the audience. If you want feedback, ask the AV guy.

24. Good line during fights: “The story I’m telling myself is…”

25. Online everyone is beautiful and it’s ugly. Offline everyone is ugly and it’s beautiful.

26. Ladder-climbing tip: “What interests my boss fascinates me.”

27. Social media wants us to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create perceptions that don’t last from people we don’t know.

28. To get more foot massages: Give more foot massages.

29. A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.

30. Excess in moderation.

31. Go outside when stressed: Trees release chemicals called phytoncides which reduce adrenaline and cortisol.

32. There is no such thing as too much cream cheese.

33. The less you complain the more fun you have. The more you complain the less fun you have.

34. Fashion tip: If you think you can pull it off you can pull it off.

35. The best way to learn is by screwing up.

36. You will stop worrying what other people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.

37. To improve a bad day: Help someone.

38. Put the weights back when you’re done.

39. Firefighter tip: Never rent an apartment above a restaurant.

40. Intrinsic motivation outperforms extrinsic motivation. To see if it’s there ask: “Would I do this for free?”

41. Good gift for a friend in the hospital: A nice bar of soap.

42. Popular often follows cool. Cool rarely follows popular.

43. Never leave home hungry.

44. There is no reward in pessimism.

45. Life is too short not to take a nap when you feel like it.

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I’m pretty sure I stole all of these but some specific credits: Thomas Murphy (10), André Perold (13), Christine D’Silva (15), Brené Brown (24), Charles E. Wilson (26), Simon Sinek (29), Gary Johnston (35), David Foster Wallace (36), my mother-in-law (41), my grandfather (43), my dad (44). Bad paraphrases all mine, of course.

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Read more of my birthday advice:

44 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 44

43 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 43

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A Happiness Tune-Up: My New Interview With Forbes

Hey everyone,

Happy end of August!

The first day of school is next Tuesday up in Toronto and with it comes the usual squeaky brakes and sharp turns as we try to get back into a rhythm and flow. To that end: I was just interviewed by Forbes magazine about some of my happiness practices and beliefs. I thought I'd share it with you below as a way to examine or refresh some thoughts as we get into the September groove.

Of course, the goal with everything I share is not to be perfect—I'm certainly not!—but just a little better than before. Think of these as little mental adjustments to help us live slightly more happier lives, Neil

P.S. If you know someone who'd like to get my bi-weekly blog posts they can sign up ​here​.

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Happiness Really Is Within Your Reach

Interview by Rodger Dean Duncan

Rodger Dean Duncan: In our stress-filled world, what factors seem to take the biggest tolls on people’s happiness?

Neil Pasricha: A lot of things! I'll mention two: loneliness and cell phones—especially social media. And I do feel they're related. On cell phones: We have to remember they're still fairly new for us culturally, and yet University of Bologna professors ​published a report​ in 'Sloan Management Review' showing that anxiety spikes when students don’t have their cellphones for even a single day. Another ​study​ found when cellphone users couldn’t answer their phones while those phones were ringing, they experienced increased heart rate, blood pressure, and anxiety. So we crave our phones! And what are we doing on them? Well, a tremendous amount of time on social media. Even though adolescents who spend more time on phones are ​more likely to report​ mental health issues. Social media feels like connection—and yet it gives us the feeling of comparison, of not being good enough, of forever robbing us of joy. I think we need to raise the age of social media from 13 to 16 and ban cell phones from classrooms, and I've been ​working with my local school board​ in Toronto (one of the largest boards in the world) to help turn these into policy. Perhaps it's no wonder we're seeing such a spike in loneliness, which is ​worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day​. In 2023 Dr. Vivek Murthy put out a ​Surgeon General's Warning​ about loneliness calling it the next big epidemic. I feel the solution to much of these issues is the same: carving out more in-person time with those we love. Connection with friends and family is the number one driver of long-term happiness.

Duncan: A lot of people these days seem to regard themselves as victims. What advice would you give them?

Pasricha: My mom was born in British Colonial Kenya in 1950 to an East Indian family that moved from Lahore to help build the railroad. She wasn't born the "right" person for her location or her culture. What do I mean? Well, she wasn't white, and she wasn't male. White people ran the country, and men were prized in her family's culture. My mom has told me that her life had a fatalist feeling of finality before she'd even gotten started. There was no sense of possibility, no options other than getting married and serving her husband's family. There was no … dot-dot-dot. Just a full stop. We all have this fatalist feeling of closure in our lives sometimes, which can sometimes lead to seeing ourselves as a victim. The question becomes: what do you do when you see the future you're walking towards but you don't like it? Sometimes the hardest thing is to keep going, to see past the period, to add a dot-dot-dot. Just keep moving. Take it day by day. Stay in the game. Keep going. Add a "yet" to any sentence you find yourself mentally beginning with "I don't", "I can't", or "I'm not" so you're saying things to yourself like "I don't qualify for that job… yet", "I'm not creative… yet", "I'm not social… yet." I think overcoming victimhood means seeing the free will that exists just past the period.

Duncan: You hold the view that life is 10% what happens and 90% how we react to it. If that’s true (and research seems to support it), a lot of people apparently didn’t get the memo. What’s the key to taking personal responsibility for our own happiness?

Pasricha: That comes from the research of Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky. She wrote a wonderful book called '​The How of Happiness​' and posits a model which says 50% of your happiness is based on your genetics, 10% of your happiness is based on your circumstances, and 40% of your happiness is based on your intentional activities. Your genetics are of course part of how you react, but it's that 40% of intentional activities that can make a big difference. The first step to taking personal responsibility for our own happiness is just realizing that what you do in the world is four times more important than what’s happening to you in the world. What can you insert into that 40%? So many research-proven, happiness-inducing activities: Exercise! Journaling! Nature walks! Reading fiction! Phoning a friend! Dancing! You are so much more powerful than you think.

Duncan: How does an attitude of gratitude seem to affect a person’s ability to deal with adversity?

Pasricha: Gratitude has a big impact on our ability to deal with adversity. Back in 2003, researchers Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough ​asked groups of students​ to write down five gratitudes, five hassles, or five events that happened over the past week for 10 straight weeks. What happened? The students who wrote five gratitudes were happier and physically healthier than the other two test groups. Physically healthier! And they didn't even go to the gym. By far and away the single best happiness and resilience practice for me has been writing down 1 awesome thing—a small pleasure, a tiny joy—every single night since 2008. For the first four years I posted them on ​1000 Awesome Things​ and now I send them out at ​midnight every night​. I recommend this practice to anyone. I always say that if you can be happy with simple things then it will be simple to be happy.

Duncan: What does research say about the relationship between personal happiness and lifespan?

Pasricha: Connection, personal happiness, and lifespan are directly related. Robert Waldinger, Director of the 1938 Harvard Adult Development Study, the longest study ever on happiness, says: "… it’s not career achievement, money, exercise, or a healthy diet. The most consistent finding we’ve learned through 85 years of study is: Positive relationships keep us happier, healthier, and help us live longer. Period." And the US Surgeon General's Warning on loneliness cites research showing that "data across 148 studies…suggest that social connection increases the odds of survival by 50%." Make more friends, be happier, live longer. I'm not saying it's easy to do, especially in a world with algorithms incentivized to keep us fuming at each other, but it is the way. If it feels hard, start small: join a bridge club, a softball team, or a local cycling group that welcomes beginners.

Duncan: You say external goals don’t help people become better people, only internal goals can. Please explain.

Pasricha: There are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic is internal—you’re doing it because you want to. Extrinsic is external—you’re doing it because you get something for it. Studies like a ​1999 meta analysis​ from Deci, Koestner, and Ryan show that when we begin to value the rewards we get for doing a task, we lose our inherent interest in doing the task. The interest we have becomes lost in our minds, hidden away from our own brains, as the shiny external reward sits front and center and becomes the new object of our desire. But when you’re doing something for your own reasons, you do more, go further, and perform better. You have to keep measuring yourself against your internal scorecard. I've written a longform piece describing this effect in more detail ​here​, too.

Duncan: What effect does people’s use of social media seem to have on their happiness?

Pasricha: I knew we'd come back to this! Social media causes four problems. And they all start with P. The first is psychological: it encourages us to compare the director's cut of our lives to everyone else's greatest hits. The second is physical: strained thumbs, spines, and eyes. Looking down at our phones adds sixty pounds of pressure to our spines! The third is physiological: our sleep is disrupted by looking at bright screens within an hour of bedtime—our brains literally produce less melatonin, the sleep hormone, overnight. And the fourth is productivity: 31% of our days are now spent bookmarking, prioritizing, and context switching instead of doing what we actually want or need to do. Every one of these alone would decrease happiness, but most of us are getting a dose of all four every day.

Duncan: You write about ikigai (pronounced like “icky guy”), the Japanese word that roughly means “the reason you wake up in the morning.” What effect does a person’s ikigai (sense of purpose) have on his/her happiness?

Pasricha: Ikigai is your purpose, the thing that drives you the most, your reason for getting it of bed in the morning. We just talked about intrinsic motivation, and ikigai fits into that perfectly. Your ikigai will help you be more creative, produce higher quality work and, as Toshimasa Sone and his colleagues at the Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine showed in a ​2008 study​, be happier and live longer. Sone's team studied the longevity of more than 43,000 Japanese adults over seven years and asked every participant, “Do you have an ikigai in your life?" People reporting an ikigai at the beginning of the study were more likely to be married, educated, and employed. They had higher levels of self-rated health and lower levels of stress. At the end of the seven-year study, 95% of the folks with an ikigai were alive. Only 83% of those without an ikigai made it that long. I change my ikigai a lot but I always keep it written on a little cue card beside my bed. For some time it may be something lofty like "helping people live happy lives.” Sometimes I'll get tactical: "Give time, love, and energy to my sick 5-year-old.” Sometimes … I'll forget! As always, the goal is not to be perfect—just better than before.

Duncan: Retirement, you say, is a broken concept. Please explain, and tell us what you’ve observed in “senior citizens” who are genuinely happy.

Pasricha: Our modern concept of retirement is relatively new! Retirement was invented by Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century and age 65 was a number created arbitrarily when the average lifespan was 67. The UK, US, and Canada all copied this number but meanwhile we've tacked 20+ years to our lifespans. I think retirement is a Western invention from days gone by that’s based on broken assumptions that we want—and can afford—to do nothing. We view retirement as a reward for years of hard work but in reality it creates loneliness and health risks. I say people don't actually want to do nothing—they want, and need, the 4 S's instead: Social (a place to see and connect with friends), Structure (having a reason to get out of bed in the morning), Stimulation (always learning something new), and Story (being part of something bigger than yourself.) You mentioned seniors! Well, according to the ​Okinawa Centenarian Study​, people in Okinawa live an average of seven years longer than Americans and have one of the longest disability-free life expectancies in the world. You know what they call retirement in Okinawan? They don't! Literally nothing in their language describes the concept of stopping work completely. Instead they have the word we talked about before—ikigai—and so we see the happiest and healthiest seniors are those still doing something they're passionate about.

Duncan: For many people, busyness has become a habit that—if not managed well—can lead to burnout and other debilitating conditions. What’s your advice?

Pasricha: The world is endlessly dinging and pinging us and most of us have alerts, notifications, and alarms going off on our phones all day. I have a lot to say on busyness in '​The Happiness Equation​'—including my Time versus Importance ​matrix​ which is meant to help force the decisions we're making into four buckets: things we can Automate, Regulate, Effectuate, and then, finally, Debate. But one concept that's not in that book, and which I've started putting into practice in my own life to help, is this idea of ​Untouchable Days​. These are days when I am literally 100% unreachable in any way…by anyone. My productivity is about 10 times higher on these days. I know on the surface this idea sounds completely impractical and I mostly get scoffing and head shakes when I start talking about it. But, I also get more emails from people successfully using this concept across a vast array of ages and careers. If it sounds too hard, there’s nothing wrong with starting with an Untouchable Lunch. Leave your phone at your desk and get outside for an hour where nobody can reach you.

Duncan: What question do you wish I had asked, but didn’t … and how would you respond?

Pasricha: You've had great questions! One question I tend to get asked about is this idea of "How can I read more books?" I'm always talking about how reading books is a great driver of happiness but, of course, everyone says they don't have time. So I'll close with a few tips to get more reading in:

1. Find a book recommender you trust. It could be a bookseller at your local indie bookstore or just getting ​monthly book recommendations from me​ or others who send out great reading lists like ​Ryan Holiday​ or ​Roxane Gay​.

2. Read on something that can't get texts. Too many people are reading on bright screens (which, as we discussed, hurt our ability to sleep) and which also endlessly interrupt our focus.

3. Unfollow all news feeds. Unsubscribe from all newspapers, too. You'll surprise yourself and still know what's going on but you'll dedicate more time for books.

4. Put your bookshelf by your front door. And move the TV to the basement!

5. Turn your phone black and white to make it less appealing. Remember cell phones are designed like slot machines. Go out of your way to turn it off, keep it in airplane mode, and yes, leave it in black and white.

6. Quit books you don’t like unapologetically! Don't let a book you don't like get in the way of the next one you're going to love.

And finally, 7. Practice the Japanese art of tsundoku—which means leaving books lying everywhere in your house. Create a culture of reading just by leaving books throughout your home.

There you go! A few tips to read more books which is one of many practices we discussed to nudge us into a little more happier lives. Thank you so much for the questions.

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Read the full two-part article on Forbes here and here.

Download the PDF here.

Learn more about the history of retirement and why you should never retire!

Want an even bigger happiness boost? Here are 7 science-backed ways to be happy right now.

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with an article I’ve written, or one of my favorite speeches, essays, or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

Why are we so bad at predicting the future?

Hey everyone,

Just a friendly reminder: None of us can see the future. When times are good that may not be so bad! We can't imagine something terrible happening. But when times are tough it's a problem because we also can't imagine things improving. Here's a piece I wrote that was posted on ​TED's blog​ and makes up a chapter in my 9-step book on resilience '​You Are Awesome: How to Navigate Change, Wrestle with Failure, and Live an Intentional Life​.'

Hope you enjoy, Neil

P.S. Leslie and I released a new journal last week! '​Two Minute Evenings​' is a simple system that will help you acknowledge the good and address the bad through the science-backed power of gratitude. Get your copy ​here​.

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Why are we so bad at predicting what will happen to us in the future?

Written by Neil Pasricha

The staircase represents your life so far. And you can’t see up the invisible staircase.

Look down behind you. That part is visible. You can see where you came from. All the steps you already walked up.

Look. There’s the time you moved in fifth grade and got bullied by that goon Adam every day after school.

Remember? That’s when you first picked up a basketball and started practicing with Coach Williams every night.

There’s Francesco, the tattooed chef who chewed you out every shift you showed up late to wash dishes at the seafood place as a teen. It was painful but you learned to be on time.

Prom—remember that disaster? I guess that night helped you realize you were gay.

So many steps up to today. Big steps. Hard steps. But steps all the same.

And what’s next on the staircase?

Well, that’s the problem.

No one knows.

It’s invisible. We can’t see the future. And maybe if that were the only problem, that would be okay. But it isn’t. It gets worse.

Why?

Because according to the research, we actually think we can see up that staircase.

Our brains think, “Oh yeah, sure, I know what’s next in my life.” In reality, we suck at it. Let me explain.

In 2013, Science published ​a fascinating study​ conducted by the researchers Jordi Quoidbach, ​Daniel T. Gilbert ​and Timothy D. Wilson. They teamed up to measure the personalities, values and preferences of more than 19,000 people ages 18 to 68. In a series of tests, they asked the subjects about two pretty simple things: how much they thought they had changed in the past decade and how much they would change in the next decade.

They used a lot of scientific methods to make sure the data were legit, then they published their results. Academic circles started buzzing. Media outlets clamored to share the results.

Why?

Because the results were mind-blowing.

It turned out that no matter how old the respondents were, they uniformly believed that they had changed a ton in the past but would change little in the future.

What?

Imagine a 30-year-old guy telling the tempestuous story of his last 10 years but figuring his next 10 years would be smooth sailing. Imagine a 50-year-old woman talking about how everything had flip-flopped after she turned 40 but then assuming that at 60, she’d be the same person she was now. That was the case for everybody regardless of age, gender or personality.

We all do it.

We all think that the way things are now is the way things will continue to be.

If you’re flying high, that’s maybe not a bad thing, but if you’re falling, if you’re busted, if you’re heartbroken, if you’re lonely, then this is a dangerous psychological tendency. And we all share it.

When we’re at rock bottom, we are certain that there’s no way up. We think we’ll never get out of our parents’ basement. We think our divorce means we’ll never meet someone new. If we’ve lost our jobs, we think we’ll be scrolling online postings forever.

The researchers called this the “end of history illusion.” We think everything will remain unchanged from here on out.

Why did those researchers study go to the effort of 19,000 people? Gilbert went on NPR’s ​Hidden Brain​ and explained, “You know, like everybody, I suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. You know, we have divorces. We have surgeries. We have breakups with women we love and friends we enjoy. So it was sort of ordinary events that befell me all in one year. And I realized that, had you asked me a year earlier how I would be faring, the answer would have been, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’ll be devastated.’ But I wasn’t devastated … And it made me wonder if I was the only person who was just too stupid to be able to look ahead into his future and figure out how he’d feel if really bad or maybe really good things happened.”

There it is. The invisible staircase.

Even Gilbert, ​the famed Harvard psychologist and professor,​ the author of bestselling books such as '​Stumbling on Happiness​,' even he forgets that the rest of the staircase is invisible. He went through a flop or two and figured, “Well, darn, my life’s gonna suck forever.” But it didn’t.

Inevitably, everything we go through in life really is a step to help us get to a better place.

It’s hard to see it this way. But we have to, because this study helps us realize we’re prone to catastrophizing. That alone should be enough to zoom backward in your brain and go, “Wait a minute here. I’m tricking myself! Who’s to say I won’t get out of the basement? Meet someone new? Land a plum gig I love?”

See it as a step.

Gilbert ended up figuring out that when it comes to predicting the future, we’re all stupid. Each and every one of us.

Doesn’t that feel better?

This research reminded me of an HR job I had where I had to escort bosses into meeting rooms whenever they had to fire an employee. I was there for paperwork, for witnessing, for emotional support. I was in the room when dozens of people got fired, and it was awful. There were tears and wet tissues and many afternoons when I’d be consoling someone in a freezing parking lot as they loaded up their trunk with framed pictures from their desk saying “I thought I’d be here forever” and “What am I going to do now?” and “I’ll never find another job.”

Those scenes left me heartbroken. I lost a lot of sleep over them.

Sometimes I’d bump into the former employees years later. And what did they tell me? “Getting fired was the best thing that happened to me! If I hadn’t gotten that severance package, I never would have had those crucial six months to spend with my dad before he died.”

Or: “I traveled to Peru and became a nutritional supplement importer, and I love what I’m doing now!”

Or: “I’m working at a smaller company now, and I’ve gotten promoted twice in two years!”

Or: “I used my severance pay to take the time to be with my daughter and son-in-law in the months after her third miscarriage.”

Why did every fired employee tell me this? Why did they all react so positively after some time had passed? How can that happen?

Because we confuse the challenge of picturing change with the improbability of change itself.

We do.

We confuse the challenge of picturing change (“What am I going to do now?”) with the improbability of change (“I’ll never find anything!”).

In other words, you can’t picture yourself changing so you assume that you won’t.

Why?

Because your seeing skills are shit. And so are mine. So are everyone’s. You think because you can’t see up the staircase there aren’t any more steps. But there are more steps.

And change will come.

It always does.

That’s why it’s so hard to see change as a step. To see this failure, this flop, this difficult life experience as part of a process, as part of a greater whole. It’s hard to see it as a step because you can’t see the next step. And you sure can’t see 10 steps after that.

Why do we always think failure leads somewhere bad? It’s not true. It rarely is. Remember the end of history illusion. Our brains think this is the end. Remember all those people I met after they were fired saying how positive that left turn ended up being?

It’s me, too. How could I have known that failing at P&G would somehow lead us to having the conversation we’re having right now? I couldn’t have. Believe me, I far prefer having this conversation to doing price analysis on eye shadows and mascaras. But when I flamed out there, I pictured myself sleeping in a pile of club sandwich crusts in Cleveland.

So be kind to yourself.

When you’re there, when you’re stewing in the shock of failure and loss, when you’re convinced you’re stuck, when you’re convinced there’s no way forward, just remember: There’s a staircase you’re not seeing. Trust that it’s there, right in front of you, and that it leads to exciting new places. Have the courage to believe in this one thing that you can’t see.

There are so many steps ahead. So many steps. Don’t stop. Shift the spotlight, and keep moving.

It’s very possible and very likely that what you’re going through is a step toward a future you’ll be happy with. But you just can’t see it … yet.

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Another potent gut-check on your present moment is to ponder ​the greatest regrets of the dying​.

Need a stronger, more consistent dose? ​Check out​ the new journal Leslie and I released last week. '​Two Minute Evenings​' will guide you through a science-backed gratitude practice designed to help you feel happier and healthier.

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with an article I’ve written, or one of my favorite speeches, essays, or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

A two-minute evening practice to move nighttime angst into gratitude and peaceful sleep

By Neil Pasricha and Leslie Richardson

“Happiness is a choice.”

Hear that saying before? Betting you have. We all have! It’s almost cliché. And yes, while research shows that a good deal of our happiness really is a choice, the saying gives us a “what” without a “how.”

We both grew up sometimes feeling anxious and overwhelmed and have come to need and rely on “hows.” Ending up in the happiness industry—Neil publishing ten books and Leslie teaching strategies to let go of the hard and grow the good in schools and families—was a surprise. We think it’s because everyone inevitably falls back into negative spirals, and perhaps it’s sharing these simple—dead simple, ruthlessly simple—systems that helps get us back on track.

So what do we do at night when our night time angst bubbles up, that dangerous mind that rears its ugly head after the dust of the day has settled, the sun has set and our resilience is low? We take two minutes individually, as a couple or together with our kids to share a rose, a second rose, a thorn and a bud. This scroll back through the day helps us inch closer to that fabled happiness North Star. It gets gratitude pumping through our blood, allows us to release the hard and surrender into peaceful sleep.

So what is Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud?

A Rose is a gratitude, highlight, or tiny positive from the day. Getting to the meeting late but the boss getting there even later. The fact that he wrote me back. The half hour of silence I got when both kids were napping.

The second Rose is just that: another small win, tiny pleasure, or highlight from the day. How cold the shower was at the end of my run. When our song came on right after I picked you up from work. The feeling of her sleeping on my chest.

Science has proven roses to be good for us! In 2003, the foundational study “Counting Blessings Versus Burdens” from Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough showed that students who wrote down “gratitudes”—versus test groups who wrote down “hassles” or “events”—weren’t just happier but also physically healthier after a ten-week period. Pretty big deal!

Then it’s time for a Thorn: something that didn’t go well, a moment of suffering, or the hardest part of your day. WE need space to vent, process, and be heard to help us move through the emotion. Still not hearing back from the doctor. Texting something snarky to my sister. Falling into a social media hole.

Thorns are also proven to be good for us! A 2006 meta-analysis by Joanne Frattaroli, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, shows that writing about emotional experiences, including negative ones, improves well-being and reduces stress. Think of sharing thorns as helping to crystalize and eject what’s prickling us inside. And one last thing: A 2001 paper by Stephen Lepore, published in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine, helpfully adds that if you’re coping with anything traumatic—and a lot of us are, let’s be honest—sharing negative emotions helps healing.

And then, finally, a Bud: something you’re looking forward to. Tonight, this weekend, even fifty years from now! Making a stack of pancakes on a Saturday. When my dad’s surgery finally gets scheduled. Renting a villa in Morocco when I turn a hundred years old.

A 2005 paper from Sonja Lyubormirsky, Kennon Sheldon, and David Schkade called “pursuing Happiness,” published in Review of General Psychology, shows that setting and anticipating future goals and events makes you happier. Buds are good for us too!

This dead simple practice is like wiping a wet shammy over the blackboard of your mind. Do it at the dinner table, with Grandma over the phone, or with your partner before bed. Use it as a simple positive pressure to connect, share, and reflect. Nothing motivates like feeling the magic of connection and compassion.

Yes, happiness is a choice. But it’s how we get there that matters. With higher-than-ever rates of societal anxiety, depression, and loneliness, these little practices can really stick, because we really do them, because they're really simple.

This practice helps us continue to inch towards happiness.

We hope it does the same for you.

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You can easily incorporate Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud into your daily life using our new journal, '​Two Minute Evenings​.' Get your copy ​right here​!

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Every other week, I send an email out with an article I’ve written, or one of my favorite speeches, essays, or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

The Only 2 Questions To Ask If You're Thinking Of Leaving Your Job

Hey everyone,

Oh, that grass, it’s always greener, isn’t it?

Whether they admit it or not I’m going to guess everyone thinks about changing careers. Eyeballing job postings, dreaming of working abroad from some South American hostel, wondering if it’s time to ask the big boss for a promotion into the open role sitting right above you.

I spent 10 years working at Walmart and over the course of those years I thought many times: “Should I do this, should I do that, should I apply for a role inside, should I apply for a role outside?”

When I left Walmart so I could focus on writing I called up my old boss ​Dave Cheesewright​ who gave me two helpful tests to make the decision.

Now, before I share the tests, I don’t want you to get me wrong. Sleepless nights, mental flip-flopping, moments of anxiety, that’s all part of it too. The goal is not to eliminate that vast array of emotions you’ll feel as you go through a career change. It’s a big decision! And it has huge consequences. Those emotions provide red, yellow and green lights along the path.

But the goal of these two tests is to eliminate any endless contemplation, to help rudder yourself, and just make sure you’re steering your life the right way.

So what are the two tests?

1. The Deathbed Test. You need to ask yourself: “When I’m looking back on my life, from my deathbed, which one of these options will I regret not doing the most?” Use that answer to helpfully guide you. In her book ‘The Top Five Regrets of the Dying,’ palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware shares that the No. 1 regret in life is “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

2. The Plan B Test. This is a simple question: “What is my Plan B?” This is the what if it fails test. You have to fully contemplate that failure. Plan for it, envision it, live through it. Could you go back to your former job or former company? Would you go get that degree you always wanted or move to Spain and take that painting class? Or would the bottom fall out of your finances completely? Your Plan B must be comfortable enough to prevent you from freezing you into risk-averse behavior after you make your move. Because if you’re picturing an empty bank account, you won’t take the chances you need to take to be successful in your next act.

For me I was thinking about whether I wanted to leave a big company to work as an author. My Deathbed Test told me “You better do this! You’ll regret it if you don’t!” and My Plan B Test told me “Well, it won’t be pretty, but if this whole thing falls to ruins, I guess I’ll polish the resume, knock on doors, and try and find another job.”

It didn’t sound so bad when I put it that way.

I hope these two tests help you along your path.

Good luck,

Neil

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There's one more principle I like to apply in these situations...the "​HELL YES!​"

Already where you want to be but still having a hard time getting stuff done? Here are the ​10 things​ you can do each morning to help you make the most of your day.

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with an article I’ve written, or one of my favorite speeches, essays, or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!