Most of the things written about pressure sell it as an emotion first and a cognitive problem later. That is a tidy story and it is comforting to think mood explains everything. I want to argue the opposite. Ongoing pressure is not primarily about feelings. It is about attention. It hijacks the mechanisms that let … Read more
There is a quiet collapse that descends not when something dramatic goes wrong but when everything goes right enough to be the same. Motivation fails when life becomes repetitive because repetition eats the feedback we need to feel alive. We mistake sameness for stability and then complain about spirit fatigue as if it arrived uninvited. … Read more
I have spent years watching people arrive at the weekend a little less intact than they were at the start of the week and then act surprised by Monday. There is a texture to that surprise that is not mere fatigue. It is a slow reconfiguration of how the brain chooses to spend its attention … Read more
I remember standing in the kitchen at 7 a.m. watching the kettle and thinking I had already run a marathon. Nothing heavy had been lifted. No emails had been sent. Still I felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to my willpower. People called it laziness. I did not call it that. What I felt … Read more
There is a stubborn line people draw between the 1960s and 1970s and our present day as if the earlier decades were an era of thicker skin and wider horizons. That claim feels partly true and partly sentimental. This piece argues that the 60s and 70s did not treat every problem as personal because the … Read more
There is a stubborn, oddly polite silence stitched into the bones of people who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. It is not the silence of secrets so much as the silence of habit. A person from those decades will often give you a short answer, tidy and final, and then move on … Read more
There is a quiet stubbornness in how people born and raised in the 1960s and 1970s learned to get through life. It was not dressed up as motivational slogans or relentless optimism. It was a habit of returning to the same things day after day. That rhythm shaped careers marriages and grief in ways the … Read more
There is a certain quiet in the voices of people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s when they talk about work. It is not just nostalgia. It is a cultural humility that sounds close to resignation. For many of that cohort the assumption was never that work should be deeply satisfying. Work was … Read more
There is a peculiar stubbornness in those who spent their formative years in the 1960s and 1970s. Not stubbornness about politics or haircuts this time but stubbornness about waiting. They learned to stand in lines and sit through delays without the fevered scroll or constant status check that defines modern impatience. That lesson was not … Read more
I keep returning to The Practical Habits of the 60s and 70s That Help With Focus Today because they feel like an antidote to modern noise. Not in a nostalgic way but in a useful stubbornness kind of way. These are not grand lifestyle revolutions. They are small rituals, a refusal to outsource attention, and … Read more