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The Good Life →
In 2014, customers at a Florida Starbucks paid for the next person's coffee in at least 378 consecutive transactions, but when the chain started again the next day, a local blogger deliberately ended it, saying it was guilt, not generosity
In 2023 the heads of OpenAI and Google DeepMind signed a warning that ranked AI's extinction risk alongside pandemics and nuclear war, yet in a 2025 Pew survey half of Americans said AI will worsen people's ability to form meaningful relationships, and only 5% expected it to improve
Human Nature →
Parents usually feel closer to their grown children than their children feel to them, and it isn't a sign something went wrong but proof something went right, because a child who needs you a little less is exactly what you spent 20 years raising
In a 2010 study of 2,250 adults, minds were wandering in nearly half the moments people were asked about, and what they were thinking about explained more of their happiness than what they were doing
Lives & Ideas →
Carl Jung suggested life splits into two halves, and the surprise is what the second is for — not more career or identity, but an inward turn he called individuation, reclaiming the parts of yourself the first half left behind
Descartes said animals were machines. Scientists now say the question isn't whether they feel.
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