An Alternative to Doomscrolling: Ten for Tuesday
When the world is falling apart, plant a tree.
Or if you’re like me and lack the energy even for that, you can read about others planting trees… or thinking deep thoughts, or simply looking at the world in a different way. To that end:
When the man meets the moment: President Zelensky.
Grateful for this third-grade teacher’s willingness to throw out the lesson plan.
An interview with Rutger Bregman, who wrote Humankind: A Hopeful History, one of my favorite books from 2021. This article is two years old and I may have even shared it before, but I’m so drawn to his hopeful, humane approach.
Feel like life is spiraling out of control? Spiral out, for real.
While we haven’t ironed out the specifics, our family will commemorate the two-year anniversary of lockdown on March 12-13. At the very least, there will be cake, because there should always be cake. Anyway, turns out a lot of people commemorate traumatic events, and it’s complicated.
I was today years old when I learned that self-care has its roots in the Black liberation movement…
Which I learned as a result of this article about Yoko Ono and how she survives and thrives.
Speaking of self-care, this Yale prof teaches about happiness, and her class is the most popular one on campus. In this interview, she says anxiety is destroying her students. (I don’t need an article about this; I’ve lived it in my own damn household.)
Incidentally, the first question is about how she took some time off due to burnout, and how if the happiness expert has to step away, what hope do we have? What an annoying framing. She nailed it on the answer, too: “Back up, back up. I took a leave of absence because I’m trying not to burn out. I know the signs of burnout… I can’t be telling my students, ‘Oh, take time off if you’re overwhelmed’ if I’m ignoring those signals. You can’t just power through and wish things weren’t happening… So it’s not a story of Even the happiness professor isn’t happy. This is a story of, I’m making these changes now so I don’t get to that point of being burned out. I see it as a positive.” Heck yeah.
And finally, my newsletter last week had even more tidbits in it.
Steady on.