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on the atlas · 114

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The issue with living an increasingly digital existence is that the internet lacks nuance. It categorises identity, rewards clear labels and leaves little room for the contradictions that make up real life. Experience becomes flattened into archetypes and aesthetics rather than lived reality.
The self-actualiser vs the hedonist
Most experience-centred ways of life are naturally community-oriented. Most self-actualising ways of being are, at least partly, solitary.
The self-actualiser vs the hedonist
Even rest has become productive. Flying somewhere simply to lie in the sun feels almost indulgent now. Holidays are now opportunities to improve: flying somewhere to exercise harder, eat cleaner and return home glown up.
The self-actualiser vs the hedonist
Health is no longer something you have; it's the vehicle through which a better life is pursued.
The self-actualiser vs the hedonist
This, to me, is one of the most profound rewards of love: that it can expand you so that more of the world becomes real to you. You can provide others with the love and care they need to transform and discover new aspects of themselves and of reality, and then, by meeting them where they are now, you can learn to see what they do, and so see further. Which will change you. And so change them again.
Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
“One loves that for which one labors, and one labors for that which one loves,”
Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
This is one of the joys and challenges of love: the more skillfully you love someone, the more held, encouraged, and accepted they feel, the more they change. If you love someone well, you have to run to keep up, growing your heart to hold what they are growing into. And this can be challenging. The direction of their change and the speed of their change can be the wrong direction and the wrong speed for you. There is no guarantee that another person’s growth aligns with what you want; sometimes you just grow apart.
Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
A relationship is a commitment to doing the work of becoming a more thoughtful person. You have to think more!! This is challenging!!
👫 relationships are challenging + a lot of work - @visakanv's blog
I feel as though it goes against human nature—not to mention unethical—to advocate for a future society that knowingly rejects the basic medicines and technology that are required for the survival of so many people
In conversation: Dave Murphy and Tom Murphy – can modernity survive planetary limits? - resilience
I make a distinction here between humanity’s future and modernity’s future. Many people conflate the two.
In conversation: Dave Murphy and Tom Murphy – can modernity survive planetary limits? - resilience
Technological innovations, such as renewable energy, tend to enhance—or at least sustain—our destructive practices, irrespective of CO2 levels. Unless we change something deeper, we can expect more of the same behaviors and outcomes.
In conversation: Dave Murphy and Tom Murphy – can modernity survive planetary limits? - resilience
God, the rain. Guangzhou has rain too, but it’s warm rain — dramatic tropical downpours that end in twenty minutes and leave everything smelling green. Changsha’s rain is cold and gray and continuous. It gets into your bones. It gets into your mood. I bought three umbrellas in my first month here and lost all of them, which feels like a metaphor for something.
I Moved Back to a Second-Tier City and Finally Started Living
I ate hot dry noodles for breakfast and thought, this city understands that mornings should have flavor.
I Moved Back to a Second-Tier City and Finally Started Living
Everyone is polite. Nobody is available.
I Moved Back to a Second-Tier City and Finally Started Living
But I’m losing what I think of as “heart energy” — 心气 — that fire in your chest that makes you want to make things, to try, to stay up late because you’re excited about an idea. I haven’t felt that in months. I go through the days. I go home. My mom makes dinner. We watch TV. It’s peaceful. It’s warm. And I feel like I’m slowly dissolving.
I Moved Back to a Second-Tier City and Finally Started Living
part of our life’s quest is to figure out why we’re drawn to the people we are and what that says about us. When relationships aren’t working, they reveal gaps within ourselves that need attention.
“it's kind of a turn-off to be 'better' than my partner”
“Love is not a state of enthusiasm. It's a verb. It implies action, demonstration, ritual, practices, communication, expression. It's the ability to take responsibility of one's own behavior. Responsibility is freedom.”
“it's kind of a turn-off to be 'better' than my partner”
“It’s that thing,” she says, “when you’re with someone, and you love them, and they know it, and they love you, and you know it, but it’s a party, and you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining, and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes… because that is your person in this life.”
“it's kind of a turn-off to be 'better' than my partner”
Next, this team will examine environmental and lifestyle factors — like diet, exercise and inflammation — that may work alongside neurogenesis to impact aging.
Superagers’ Brains Keep Growing New Neurons - Neuroscience News
hippocampal neurogenesis
Superagers’ Brains Keep Growing New Neurons - Neuroscience News
Superagers had twice the neurogenesis of the other healthy older adults,”
Superagers’ Brains Keep Growing New Neurons - Neuroscience News
They describe a particular kind of exhaustion: not just from overwork, but from the cognitive load of performing normalcy while privately managing fear.
What NIH Staff Can’t Tell You—And Why That Matters
Australia's social infrastructure runs on not-for-profit clubs such as RSLs, surf lifesaving clubs, bowls clubs and leagues clubs, all member-owned, community-governed, and structured so that profits stay local. It's essentially the co-op model that Britain is only now discovering, except Australia built thousands of them.
Britain Lost 14,000 Third Places. They Were Called Pubs. Is Your Local Next?
The map of pub death is a map of where extraction was profitable and reinvestment wasn't.
Britain Lost 14,000 Third Places. They Were Called Pubs. Is Your Local Next?
For a private equity firm, that’s not a community asset, it’s a leveraged buyout opportunity. Acquire, load with debt, extract, underinvest, and when the pub becomes unviable, sell the land to developers at a multiple.
Britain Lost 14,000 Third Places. They Were Called Pubs. Is Your Local Next?
Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone, measured what happens when they vanish: trust collapses, civic life withers, democracy frays. No places, no trust. No trust, no society. But neither asked the question that matters most for Britain in 2026: who is doing the dismantling of these third spaces, and why?
Britain Lost 14,000 Third Places. They Were Called Pubs. Is Your Local Next?
For some, their blogs give off the impression that the blog is the best instantiation of their life’s work, for others it feels like a footnote.
Notes on Meeting Successful Bloggers In Person
“How did I get here” is a question that sometimes enables a mood of “and where else could I go?”
My six stages of learning to be a socially normal person
I realized that I’d been stuck in my head for my whole life — that this is not a figure of speech, but a real description of how your subjectivity is very different when you’re uncomfortable with emotion, and living behind the sensory filter created by a rigid self-concept.
My six stages of learning to be a socially normal person
Previously, I’d thought there were two choices you had with a social script: reject it, or go along with it. But I started developing an instinct for a third choice: how to take the other person sideways, into the weirdness of open possibility, where it’s not clear how anyone should feel, and there are no requirements.
My six stages of learning to be a socially normal person
Among these pre-symptomatic individuals, researchers observed previously unknown (before this study) changes in blood proteins before the patients later developed symptoms. These protein shifts point to early dysfunction in skeletal muscle, nerve signaling and energy metabolism, suggesting ALS may affect the body long before traditional clinical signs emerge.
New Blood Test for ALS Detects Early Signs Years Before Symptoms Appear | Johns Hopkins Medicine
In present-day industrialised societies, energy intake is regulated less by availability and more by cognitive restraint by individuals, there being very weak physiological homeostatic mechanisms to prevent weight gain.
Nutritional anthropology in the world | Journal of Physiological Anthropology | Full Text
An area of promise for nutritional anthropology lies in understanding how social processes can shape genetic expression [38] in the construction of nutritional health and disease [36].
Nutritional anthropology in the world | Journal of Physiological Anthropology | Full Text
Using integrated biocultural approaches, nutritional anthropology also took within its remit ecological investigations of undernutrition [7] and obesity [8, 9], as well as study of localised food systems [10], food security [11], infant feeding and adaptation [12], the political ecologies of dietary change and nutritional health, in the contexts of globalisation, migration, inequality [11] and colonialism [13].
Nutritional anthropology in the world | Journal of Physiological Anthropology | Full Text
While few foods are uniquely identified by biomarkers, a profile of biomarkers may serve to characterize adherence to a particular dietary pattern. Plasma metabolic signatures of healthy dietary patterns (e.g. AHEI-2010, DASH, Mediterranean) have been identified in adults with CKD,73 and serum metabolomic signatures of plant-based diets have been shown to predict incident CKD.74 Serum metabolomic markers of dietary acid load have also been identified75 and predict incident CKD.75
Nutritional Epidemiology and Dietary Assessment for Patients With Kidney Disease: A Primer - PMC
Characterization of the food metabolome and proteome – the sum of compounds resulting from digestion, absorption, and metabolism of consumed foods72 – is currently being explored to identify objective biomarker “signatures” of foods and dietary patterns, and to study relationships between diet and CKD.
Nutritional Epidemiology and Dietary Assessment for Patients With Kidney Disease: A Primer - PMC
Only four recovery biomarkers have been identified: 24-hour urinary nitrogen, reflecting protein intake; 24-hour urinary potassium and sodium, reflecting intakes of these minerals; and doubly-labeled water, a measure of energy expenditure that is interpreted as a marker of energy intake in weight-stable individuals.
Nutritional Epidemiology and Dietary Assessment for Patients With Kidney Disease: A Primer - PMC
Incorporating a run-in period may be useful to evaluate adherence prior to randomization and standardize baseline exposure. Additional considerations for designing and conducting human nutrition RCTs are detailed elsewhere.
Nutritional Epidemiology and Dietary Assessment for Patients With Kidney Disease: A Primer - PMC
The root of the contradiction is that the same model that considers that a pragmatic attitude aims to inform clinical decision-making assumes that health care decision-makers speak the language of populations. In reality, while historically decisions made by policy-makers have been population based, clinical decisions are always individual based. (Sacristan and Dilla 2018)
Toward more rigorous and informative nutritional epidemiology: the rational space between dismissal and defense of the status quo - PMC
Many textbooks on clinical and experimental research design in the behavioral health sciences emphasize “conventional” experimental or quasi-experimental designs, including (but not limited to) two-group parallel arm, factorial, withdrawal, crossover, and pragmatic trial designs (Friedman et al. 2010; Shadish, Campbell, and Cook 2001; Windsor et al. 2001; Meinert 1986). While such designs are essential to the experimentalist’s toolkit, novel or less well-known variations on these designs may be useful. Stepped-wedge cluster randomized designs (Hemming et al., 2015); within-cohort randomized tr…
Toward more rigorous and informative nutritional epidemiology: the rational space between dismissal and defense of the status quo - PMC
In fact, in a cruel twist of fate, it is precisely the expectation of domestic bliss that may set us up for infidelity. Once, we strayed because marriage was not supposed to deliver love and passion. Today, we stray because marriage fails to deliver the love
Why Happy People Cheat - The Atlantic
Strange as it may seem, affairs have a lot to teach us about marriage—what we expect, what we think we want, and what we feel entitled to. They reveal our personal and cultural attitudes about love, lust, and commitment—attitudes that have changed dramatically over the past 100 years.
Why Happy People Cheat - The Atlantic
If you can train yourself to ask “is there a better way to do this?” at random intervals ten times a day, you will become unstoppable.
50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
The people who make real change in the world are those who live on the knife edge between optimism (everything is really going to be okay) and pessimism (but everything is bad by default).
50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
While some studies have demonstrated that resistance exercise is superior to aerobic exercise [15], others have indicated stronger long-term effects of aerobic endurance training compared with strength training
Bouldering psychotherapy is more effective in the treatment of depression than physical exercise alone: results of a multicentre randomised controlled intervention study | BMC Psychiatry | Full Text
To be perceptive you also need to be able to see through—that is, see through your mental models and notice things about the underlying reality that your model cannot explain.
Becoming perceptive - by Henrik Karlsson
Perceptiveness is not (only) about seeing more.
Becoming perceptive - by Henrik Karlsson
Self-actualization means, at least partly, that you have designed a life that fits you, that allows you to express your human potential. And, as I talked about in the last part, to make a good design, to find a fit, you need to perceive the context you are designing for clearly.
Becoming perceptive - by Henrik Karlsson
There is nothing cryptic about the West Village girl. She embodies a version of youth that feels frictionless, almost corporate in its branding. What she is not, however, is basic. That’s part of what makes her compelling; she’s mastered the aesthetics of self-presentation without the burden of justification. She is not performing complexity, and in a culture thriving on micro-analysis and virtue signaling, that can read as naive. But it’s a choice. Young women have always been, and will always be, scrutinized for what they do or don’t do, what they wear, and what they say or don’t say.
“In the long run, every writer is misunderstood”
In the end, the West Village girl isn’t a person so much as a lifestyle package and a performance, a sunlit loop of content, beauty, and brunch. Whether or not this young woman resides in the neighborhood is almost beside the point. She lives in an algorithm by representing a kind of aspirational femininity—polished, apolitical, and highly visible. All of that makes her an easy target for public ire.
“In the long run, every writer is misunderstood”