Weekly Mix #226 - Rational Optimism, Hybrid Work, Buying Happiness & 2022 Trends

Rational Optimism, Hybrid Work, Buying Happiness & 2022 Trends

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Happy Monday!

It's impossible to ignore notifications.

We get them all day long—email, texts, banners, comments, requests—it's endless.

Notifications that we read can bother and distract us, but so can those that are unread.

The notification you accidentally glance at during the evening, or dinner, or on weekend.

You may not look, but you know it's there.

And it occupies your mind regardless. Do you risk looking at it? And finding out it's something you need to attend to? Or try to ignore it?

The solution? not getting the notifications in the first place.

Books like Indistractable, Digital Minimalism and Deep Work are good places to start.

But in the end, it's up to us to stop letting notifications—even unread ones—distracting us in the first place.

Have a great week.

Graham

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Links

📚 Book Notes: The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley - This was one of my highlight books of 2021. Counter-intuitive in many ways, Ridley presents the case that we should all be a little more optimistic about the world. Some of the things that caught me by surprise: climate change may be a net positive, wind energy isn't nearly as good as I thought, and "self-sufficiency is poverty."

📖 Why hybrid work is emotionally exhausting - Alex Christian, BBC - A changing routine, maintaining two workspaces, and having hybrid rules imposed are a few of the reasons cited in this article about the difficulties with hybrid work.

📖 Money Can Buy Happiness After All - Carmen Ang, Visual Capitalist - The data summarized in this article matches another point Matt Ridley made in The Rational Optimist, which is that higher income is correlated with higher happiness, even past the $75K mark, which had been a previous benchmark.

📖 The Rescue Artists of the New Avalanche Age - Joshua Hammer, GQ - A fascinating story about the largest alpine rescue team in the world, the Swiss company Air-Glaciers, who fly ~2500 missions a year.

📖 The Future 100: Trends an Change to Watch in 2022 - Wunderman Thompson Intelligence - A fascinating deck full of trends that are expected to continue in 2022, with everything from culture, to health, to technology.

🍿 Bjorn Dunkerbeck hitting 100km/h+ in Luderitz - Luderitz, a town in Namibia, is the spot for kiteboarding and windsurfing speed records. This FPV drone video shows Red Bull windsurfer Bjorn Dunkerbeck hitting an insane 103.68 km/h.

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