When is the last time you just did something for fun…no…really…just for fun? It seems that we are always striving and trying to be the “best” at everything we do.

That’s why I was intrigued by an article by Tim Wu entitled “In Praise of Mediocrity.” He nailed it and said what I think most of us have been thinking for quite a while. Here’s how he begins:

I’m a little surprised by how many people tell me they have no hobbies. It may seem a small thing, but — at the risk of sounding grandiose — I see it as a sign of a civilization in decline. The idea of leisure, after all, is a hard-won achievement; it presupposes that we have overcome the exigencies of brute survival. Yet here in the United States, the wealthiest country in history, we seem to have forgotten the importance of doing things solely because we enjoy them.

Yes, I know: We are all so very busy. Between work and family and social obligations, where are we supposed to find the time?

But there’s a deeper reason, I’ve come to think, that so many people don’t have hobbies: We’re afraid of being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time. Our “hobbies,” if that’s even the word for them anymore, have become too serious, too demanding, too much an occasion to become anxious about whether you are really the person you claim to be.

If you’re a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you’re training for the next marathon. If you’re a painter, you are no longer passing a pleasant afternoon, just you, your watercolors and your water lilies; you are trying to land a gallery show or at least garner a respectable social media following. When your identity is linked to your hobby — you’re a yogi, a surfer, a rock climber — you’d better be good at it, or else who are you?

Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it. Hobbies, let me remind you, are supposed to be something different from work. But alien values like “the pursuit of excellence” have crept into and corrupted what was once the realm of leisure, leaving little room for the true amateur. The population of our country now seems divided between the semipro hobbyists (some as devoted as Olympic athletes) and those who retreat into the passive, screeny leisure that is the signature of our technological moment.

This is just a snippet. Want more? You can read the full article here

We all have bucket lists, right? And we’re earnestly working our way through it. Whew, that’s exhausting even thinking about it.

That’s why I loved Joe Queenan’s recent article: “It’s Time to Kick the Bucket List.” Here’s how he begins:

Americans have become obsessed with supposedly transformative experiences. But is bungee-jumping in Madagascar what will really make life complete?

The American bucket list is in a state of crisis. The obsessive need to parasail over volcanoes in Mongolia, swim with man-eating sharks in the Seychelles and sleep in every farmhouse that George Washington ever bedded down in has contributed to a national epidemic of bucket-list neurosis.

Americans are so obsessed with running a 100-mile marathon in the Outback, visiting every Double-A baseball stadium in the country or flying in a hot-air balloon over Fiji that all the fun has gone out of having a bucket list in the first place. Compiling a bucket list was once the perfect way to pass the dreamy days of summer vacation. Now it’s just another form of work.

Like American Youth Soccer and contemporary country music, bucket lists started out as something harmless and amusing before turning into a nightmare. Officially, the concept of the bucket list derives from the bellicosely heartwarming 2007 film of that name about two doomed old coots competing with one another to polish off a list of personal dreams before the Grim Reaper carries them off. But as so often happens in this otherwise great country, something that started out as a joke became a clinical disorder. It’s as if every woman who watched “Thelma and Louise” suddenly decided that it was a good idea to drive a car off a cliff.

Today, everyone with a few bucks to spare seems to be fixated on bucket lists. 100 places to see before you die. No, make that 1,000 places. Fifty restaurants to eat in before you die—no, 200. The Top 111 Bucket List Ideas. 329 Great Bucket List Ideas. 15,378 Top-Quality Bucket List suggestions.

Alas, bucket lists tend to be obvious and generic: See the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids, Mount Fuji, the Aurora Borealis, the West Edmonton Mall. Such ready-made, just-add-water lists are infuriating. It’s tragic that anyone would need to consult somebody else’s list to compile their own. A bucket list is supposed to be deeply personal, the product of much internal debate and intense self-searching. It’s not supposed to be just another dumb thing you found on the Internet.

Want more? You can read the full article here

We all have a “to do” list with things we know we need to get done. And we always get to all of them, right? Well, not exactly.

That’s why I was taken by Tim Herrera’s recent Here to Help piece, “Why Your Brain Tricks You Into Doing Less Important Tasks.” Here’s how he begins:

Here’s a list of things I did before starting this newsletter: I filled out the documents to renew my passport; clipped my cat’s nails; bought some household items; responded to a few Instagram DMs; and ate a snack because I was hungry.

Sound familiar?

Some of those tasks were relatively urgent — I need to get my passport in order soon, and those Instagram DMs were weighing on me. But none of those tasks were as important as writing this newsletter. I know I needed to get this done, but the call of those minor-yet-urgent tasks was too strong.

To all of my procrastinators out there, I offer an explanation: Your brain is working against you, and it’s because of a phenomenon called the urgency effect.

In other words: Even if we know a larger, less-urgent task is vastly more consequential, we will instinctively choose to do a smaller, urgent task anyway. Yet again, thanks for nothing, brain.

So what are we to do? To answer that, let’s talk about boxes — specifically, one developed by our 34th president, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Picture a 2×2 square with four boxes. At the top of the square are two labels: Urgent and non-urgent. On the left are two other labels: Important and not important.

On any given day, try to put every task you have to do into one of those four boxes. You’ll quickly see that the things tied to approaching deadlines are quite often not the most important things you have on your plate. Accordingly, schedule time to finish them later or, if possible, delegate them.

This is just a snippet. Want more? You can read the full article here

Want to enjoy summer more? Of course you do…don’t we all? I needed a bit of encouragement to relax and do so, and found just the tonic in Patricia Hampl’s piece, “The Season for Learning To Do Nothing.” Here’s how she begins:

I barely had time to digest my colleague’s automated out-of-office email reply—“I regret missing your message. I am out of the office for two weeks on vacation, without access to email”—when her email arrived. Thirty seconds, and there she was, zooming in to solve my minor bureaucratic problem from her lake cabin half a continent away. She was still on the job, at the ready to put out any little fire flaring up on the distant horizon. “I’m only checking email twice a day,” she wrote sheepishly—or was it proudly?

We are all breathless with our busyness, over-amped with everything we must/should/could do, gleaming with how necessary we are. Time off is a guilty pleasure. Or maybe, deep down in the contemporary heart, it’s mainly just guilty: I should be making myself useful, if only to myself. This duty-driven life makes it difficult to really and truly go on vacation, or as we say, “take” a vacation—as if it were a form of theft, low-grade larceny, time pilfered from the cash machine.

How to leap off the grid of good behavior and duty, how to be out of reach? Especially out of reach of one’s own inner compulsion to be—well, doing something.

Some vacations, of course, pose no such problem. Skiing, scuba diving, following the Piero della Francesca trail in Umbria—such vacations are chosen assignments, pleasurable tasks, activities, projects. No trouble there.

But how about just letting go, allowing yourself to drift into a free fall of ease for a couple of weeks? Spend the day without knowing quite where it went—and be happy about this lapse into timelessness. Take two weeks to do nothing much, to have nothing to show for it—and find you’re the better for it. Possible?

Want more? You can read the full article here

One of the things most people agree on is that high self-esteem is good, and low self-esteem is bad. Most of us more-or-less accept that “truth.”

That’s why I was quite taken by the review of “Selfie” a book that tries to get at the root of how we’ve gone from just having self-esteem to being self-obsessed. Here’s how it begins:

Worrying about one’s own narcissism has a whiff of paradox. If we are suffering from self-obsession, should we really feed the disease by poring over another book about ourselves? Well, perhaps just one more.

“Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us,” by Will Storr, a British reporter and novelist, is an intriguing odyssey of self-discovery, in two senses. First, it tells a personal tale. Storr confesses to spending much of his time in a state of self-loathing and he would like to know why. On a quest to explore self-esteem and its opposite, he interviews all sorts of people, from CJ, a young American woman whose life revolves around snapping, processing and posting hundreds of thousands of selfies, to John, a vicious London gangster who repented of his selfish ways, possibly because of his mother’s prayers to St. Jude. Storr takes part in encounter groups in California, grills a Benedictine monk cloistered at Pluscarden Abbey in Scotland, and gets academic psychologists to chat frankly about their work. Storr’s side of the conversations he recounts tends to be blunt, inquisitive and peppered with salty British swearing. One comes to like him, even if he does not often like himself.

Want more? You can read the full article here

Many of us grew up with Fred Rogers…and for those who didn’t…your kids did. But few know how the show got started or much, for that matter, of what went on behind the scenes.

That’s why I found this piece by David Brooks, “Fred Rogers and the Loveliness of the Little Good,” so interesting. Here’s how it begins:

Often people are moved to tears by sadness, but occasionally people are moved to tears by goodness. That’s what happens to the audiences of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” the new documentary about Fred Rogers.

The documentary demonstrates how Rogers’s children’s show got started and how he used it over 30 years to teach and accompany children. It describes the famous opening sequence — Mister Rogers going to the closet, putting on the sweater, changing his shoes. It describes how he gently gave children obvious and non obvious advice: You are special just the way you are; no, children can’t fall down the drains in the bathtub.

Sometimes he would slow down time, be silent for long periods as he fed his fish. Occasionally “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” touched politics. During the civil rights era, when black kids were being thrown out of swimming pools, Rogers and a black character bathed their feet together in a tub. After Bobby Kennedy was killed, Rogers gently explained what an assassination was.

There’s nothing obviously moving here, and yet the audience is moved: sniffling, wiping the moisture from their cheeks. The power is in Rogers’s radical kindness at a time when public kindness is scarce. It’s as if the pressure of living in a time such as ours gets released in that theater as we’re reminded that, oh yes, that’s how people can be.

This is just a snippet. Want more? You can read the full article here

Who doesn’t want more self-control? Talk about and easy question.

While there isn’t an easy answer to gaining the degree of self-control we all seem to want, Tim Herrera recently teed up some good ideas. Appropriately, his piece features a plate of delicious-looking chocolate brownies. Here’s how he begins:

Picture this: You’re staring down a plate of fresh brownies during your 2 p.m. lull. You had an early lunch so your stomach is grumbling, and dinner feels a lifetime away. What happens next?

You’re probably eating those brownies, friend-o. (And I am, ahem, definitely not pulling this story from personal experience.)

Self-control in the face of temptation is a tricky thing. We tend to view it in black-and-white, almost moralistic terms: Anyone who succumbs to temptation, in whatever form, clearly must be weak willed. A stronger person would never eat that brownie, fall into a 90-minute YouTube spiral or watch another three episodes of “Billions” instead of writing his weekly newsletter.

But the science behind self-control tells a different story.

A 2011 study that examined how people deal with self-control found that those of us who are best at it aren’t more strong-willed or dedicated: They simply experience temptation less.

In fact, the very idea that we can improve our self-control is in question: A 2016 study found that “training self-control through repeated practice does not result in generalized improvements in self-control.”

In other words, don’t beat yourself up over a lack of self-control: We’re wired to be bad at it. But that’s not the end of the story.

Want more? You can read the full article here

Memorial Day has come and gone, and with it, for many, a focus on our veterans. That’s why I was strike by the piece by Army Veteran Allison Jaslow. Here’s how the article begins:

If you’ve worn the uniform of our armed forces, you’ve put your life on the line for our country. This Memorial Day, we’ll remind ourselves that some men and women made the ultimate sacrifice so that we can live free in this great nation.

It’s not surprising, then, that many Americans are looking to veterans to help us out of these dark and divisive times. Political parties are recruiting veteran candidates as their “secret weapons” in the midterm elections, and advocates for causes ranging from gun rights to gun control to helping undocumented immigrants are elevating veteran voices to advance their agendas.

But is electing more veterans the solution to our nation’s problems? I wish that were all it took.

As a veteran myself, I appreciate that many Americans hold us in high esteem. But the rush to promote veteran candidates is evidence that we expect more out of our elected leaders than we do of ourselves. And that’s what really ails America.

This is just a snippet. Want more? You can read the full article here

As President Harry Truman famously said, “Everybody likes a compliment.” That was true when he said it over a half-century ago, and perhaps even more true now as anything that gives us pause in our fast-paced lives is – and should be – a good thing. The question becomes, if we receive a compliment, what do we do?

I’ve always struggled with that question, that’s why I was intrigued Carolyn Bucoir’s piece, “How to Accept a Compliment.” Here’s how she begins:

Alone in my office one afternoon, I unpeeled the wrapper from a square of chocolate with a deliberate curiosity not associated with office snacking. As the minty candy dissolved in my mouth, I read the words printed inside the wrapper: “Accept a compliment.”

I would normally not say yes to suggestions from strangers who work in what I assume is the marketing department of Dove Chocolate, Promises Division. But they aren’t alone in their advice. “Ladies, why the heck can’t we take a compliment?” a Prevention writer asked in a January headline. The message: C’mon women. Quit being apologists. Fully accept the compliments you deserve — without any self-deprecation or changing of the subject.

Until this point, I would have responded to a compliment — say, on my hair — with half acknowledgment and half distraction. “Thanks, but [acknowledge recent struggle with hair or hairdresser]. Ha ha ha.” Doing so restored order. But while a simple “Thank you” was not my style, I decided to try it.

Walking home from work, I approached a neighbor on a ribbon of sidewalk that passes for Main Street in our Wisconsin town. I smiled and waved as we neared each other. Caren smiled and waved back and when I was within earshot, she shouted, “I like your dress!”

I assumed this was an easy audition for the New and Improved Way to Accept Compliments and simply said, “Thank you.”

A short pause followed. It was so deeply still and awkward that had our entire exchange been filmed and replayed, a viewer might reasonably think the video had paused.

When we reanimated, Caren’s eyes acquired a hard look. “It’s appropriate,” she said. “I like when people dress appropriately.”

“Oh. Ummm. Ugh,” I sputtered and continued my walk home, embarrassed. What had I missed by failing to add a remark about how old or inexpensive my dress was?

Want more? You can read the full article here

Most Americans admire Senator John McCain, but few of us really know him. We know of his many accomplishments, but not so much regarding what makes him…well…him.

That’s why I was intrigued by Timothy Egan’s recent piece, “John McCain’s Lesson Before Dying.” Here’s how he begins:

Steve Jobs had outlasted an initial death sentence — three to six months to live, the doctors had said — when he told Stanford graduates that the threat of an early demise was perhaps the most liberating thing that ever happened to him.

I was thinking of Jobs, who died seven years after a diagnosis of deadly pancreatic cancer, while watching the public tutorial of Senator John McCain going through what may be his final days.

McCain is not just plotting the details of his own funeral, but living it. He’s lucky. Most of us don’t get the chance to tell friends and family members how much we love them, to put things in order — and in return, to hear from those people about what a difference a life made to them.

“Then I’d like to go back to our valley and see the creek run after the rain and hear the cottonwoods whisper in the wind,” said McCain in an excerpt he read from his forthcoming book, “The Restless Wave.” You could hear Hemingway, the senator’s favorite author, in those words.

This is just a snippet. Want more? You can read the full article here