Chances are, your job has changed in the past year. And it’s not just that we’ve swapped cubicles for kitchen tables, donned protective gear, and adopted Zoom for everything from board meetings to birthday parties. How we think about work — and how we feel about it — has changed, too.

In her newsletter Culture Study, Anne Helen Petersen, whose book Out of Office comes out later this year, writes: “This has been the hardest thing for people who didn’t work from home before the pandemic to visualize: your current WFH scenario is not your future WFH scenario.” She predicts…

There’s a new hope that soon we’ll all be vaccinated and some aspects of life will begin to look more normal. But for many of us, today still feels like a carbon copy of yesterday and the week before and last month. Each day includes three Zoom calls, staring out the window, eating snacks for dinner, and then accidentally checking work emails from the couch at 9 p.m. No wonder we feel burnt out.

The Scandinavian and Nordic countries have a tradition that might just offer some relief: breaking up the workweek with a celebration on Wednesday nights. In Swedish…

Quality connections are hard to come by… especially during the pandemic and with social distancing. But even in the Before Times, genuine, lasting connections seemed elusive.

But why?

Part of the problem may include the addictive nature of smartphones and social media. During the pandemic, these devices are a lifeline to our friends and loved ones. But in non-pandemic times, being glued to our screens and devices is more of a boon for marketers and advertisers than it is for the quality of our relationships.

Then there’s the chronic stresses and anxieties we face. It often feels impossible to manage…

We can imagine that Marcus Aurelius was a busy man, perhaps the busiest man in the world. He had 14 children. He was living through a pandemic. He had a nagging stomach ailment. He was taking philosophy classes.

Oh, and he was the emperor of Rome. His domain stretched some 2.2 million square miles and included some 120 million people for whom he was both responsible for and in charge of.

How did he manage it all? How did he get it all done? Without losing his mind? Without falling behind?

We know that one question played a huge role.

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Imagine this: You’ve been diagnosed with a rare and serious disease. In hopes of keeping you alive, the doctor recommends a new, experimental course of treatment. It works for some people — maybe 60%. But it’s covered by your insurance, and if you are in the 60%, you’ll be successfully cured in six months. What do you do?

Of course you say yes. Maybe you’ll get unlucky and it won’t work for you, but it’s worth a try. You’d probably try the treatment even with only a 10% success rate. …

🍿 Today’s tip: Make a normal TV veg-out session into a movie night.

“In our busy, goal-driven society, it’s easy to overlook the delight found in the little moments,” Itxy Lopez writes in Mind Cafe. “We try to achieve so much in so little time that the beauty of life itself gets lost.” Lopez writes about how she and her family make a practice of making mundane moments feel really special, from spontaneous dance parties to no-reason game nights.

She recalls a time when she and her family were watching a television show, and set up a bunch of blankets…

💭 Today’s tip: Every time you feel envious, ask what your envy is telling you.

Maybe at first we thought pandemic life meant the end of FOMO. And yet, nature is healing: Our feeds are once again full of envy-inducing vacations, magazine-perfect home offices, selfies of people somehow… thriving, or anyway seeming to. But if you feel a pang of envy at someone’s “personal news” tweet, don’t beat yourself up. Just listen to what that envy is telling you.

As Darius Foroux writes in his weekly Stoic Letter, “Every time you feel envious, check your priorities. Take the envy as…

In the past year, many of us have had to alter, expand, or completely re-conceptualize the definition of progress to make room for the daily tasks that, one or two years ago, wouldn’t have appeared remotely noteworthy. You watered all of your plants? Congratulations. You finished reading that book you bought in 2016? Huge.

Planning to run a marathon or even organizing a jam-packed social weekend might have once seemed easily in your grasp, but changing realities require adjustments to our capacities. …