From TikTok’s glorified youth culture to academic pressure, debt, and social comparison, new research and personal stories suggest real happiness may come much later than expected.
Tag: life
When a child’s blunt questions about death collide with the sudden loss of a neighbor, glass marbles in hand, lessons on fragility and presence take shape in unexpected ways.
We always want to go higher, faster, further. Understandable. But ambition creates pressure, making our everyday lives harder than they need to be. Die Zeit columnist Kilian Trotier makes the case for enjoying the average.
Many of life’s biggest questions can’t be answered by an algorithm. We must learn to embrace uncertainty instead.
In 19 years in Gaza, she always felt lost in her mind, body and even time. She was desperate to escape abroad, and made one attempt after another to find a way out. Eventually she did, for better or worse.
The modern world conspires to make us fear reflection and solitude, but these might be the rocky paths to a happier life, if we could first stop hating them.
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Smile, It May Help You Live Longer
Even more so than laughter, smiling is the human trait par excellence. It’s a real language — but can we learn to understand it? Or to cultivate it? The rewards could be high, and not just to boost morale: Smiling could increase life expectancy.
Each year, millions of trees are sacrificed for the sake of Christmas — an ecological disaster and a denial of what trees represent for humanity. There are, however, some green alternatives to buying (and killing) your own private tree each year.
It’s difficult to take a breath in the middle of all of the parenting chaos — but if we aren’t able to tell when happy moments are unfolding, we risk missing them altogether.
A bit like the playwright Fernando Arrabal who launched an artistic project of decades after spotting a several disjointed phrases, our columnist reflects on the anodyne coincidences that led him to write these words.
As the world moves to renewable energy, demand for lithium has surged. But the race to extract the precious mineral comes with hidden costs for local communities and the environment. So just how green is the energy transition after all?
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Top Cities For Your Career Abroad
European cities dominate both the top and the bottom of the Urban Work Life Index, according to findings in the Expat Insider survey.
Anesthesia, or a temporary state of “nothingness,” may be our closest experience of death without dying, and a reminder of the fragility of our lives.
German psychologist Stephan Grünewald has some insights on how nearly a year’s worth of coronavirus restrictions are impacting people’s mental health.
The jury’s still out on whether COVID-19 can be transmitted sexually. But there’s no doubt that it has made many people more cautious about intimacy.
PRAGUE — As I walked down Avenue René Coty on a sunny day in late May, everything was like a Paris postcard — except that my glasses were fogging up over my facemask. But I knew the scenery by heart by then, as I had never left a one-kilometer radius around my student residence during […]
For a number of French people, the two-month confinement period offered time to reflect and reassess priorities.
‘Where do we go to die, when we have lived thousands of lifetimes in a world that was not made for us?’
A facility that opened last year in the northern city of Monza offers residents a fleeting respite from the lonely, disorienting effects of dementia.
If it doesn’t ‘spark joy,’ the guest of the hit Netflix series ‘Tidying Up’ tells us, get rid of it. Should the same lesson be applied to our circle of friends and acquaintances?
SARI — On this frigid January night, Maliheh Salimi’s home is brimming with excitement. A rental company delivered metal chairs and tables early in the morning. Pink and white balloons were inflated; lace was knotted in the shape of a butterfly and pinned on the walls. Large pans, full of rice that Maliheh had left […]
Easing pain and ‘old-fashioned’ home care, rather than intensive hospitalization, are proving themselves as better and cheaper ways to treat terminal patients.
By becoming president for life, Xi Jinping is bringing China back to its imperial history, taking advantage of the exceptional development of his country but also of America’s mistakes. But Chinese coming fortunes are still very much up in the air.
-Essay- PARIS — Growing crops without the herbicide glyphosate is probably a good thing. Or maybe not. I admit that I have no idea. I’m no doctor, no farmer, nor do I possess any technical competence that would enable me to have an informed opinion on the matter. On the other hand, I do have […]
-Essay- Until last year I lived in Istanbul with my husband. We’re both from Australia and we taught English at local universities. We had a great life, with wonderful Turkish friends like Hasan and Nurhan (not their real names.) On Friday nights in the summer, we went out to dinner with them. On one such […]
VERSAILLES — With the attention to detail that comes with doing something for the last time, Béatrix Saule checks on the 200 clocks that chime one after another. She unfolds a shutter to protect the drapes from the sun. She tests the floor to see if there’s any movement in stonework. Saule has been doing […]
MUNICH — Grief is demonstrative resistance against loss. Cemeteries and funerals are ways to combat death, preserving the lives of the departed by allowing people to remember them. Death, we are told, is a part of life. But those who went earlier this month to the cemetery on All Hallows, All Souls Day, will have […]
The promise of eternal life gets a boost from the latest technologies, but there are troubling questions that go beyond science.
Our linear, utilitarian view of time may be simply a construct of this modern, materialist civilization. What’s the rush? What does it mean?
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Laboratory Tests — Video Quote Of The Day
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Run In The Snow — Video Quote Of The Day
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Bungee Jumping — Video Quote Of The Day
Some believe names represent more than just a matter of taste, that they destine people to certain fates. But most everyone can agree that certain names are simply bad choices.
Climate change, pollution, terrorism. Teenagers are increasingly scared of what’s ahead, and why wouldn’t they be? While a certain amount of fear is normal, psychologists advise teens to get help when anxiety takes over.
Plus, bonus coverage from the *celestial* hometown rag …
Morocco was among the first Arab and Muslim countries to approve the birth-control pill. Now women activists are fighting for the right to choose to have an abortion.
-OpEd- BOGOTA — Once upon a time our cities had physical spaces and institutions that allowed people of different social groups to mix and interact, at least to a degree. Downtown cafés attracted politicians, intellectuals, traders and students. Churches — back when people still attended mass in significant numbers — were another place where people […]
Modern life, with its rules and material rewards, has robbed people of the most basic sense of happiness. What do we have to lose by ridding ourselves of so many imposed ideas?
Gossip columns and scurrilous TV shows peer into people’s private lives more every day. Not about freedom of information, they perpetuate the social complexes of the Colonial era.
The American-invented dream of averting the finality of death by freezing one’s body is a world unto its own. Now it’s spreading to the UK, France and beyond.