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Most of us think we judge people piece by piece.
Sixty-six days. That is the average it actually took a group of volunteers at University College London to turn a new behavior into something close to automatic.
Researchers at Brock University surveyed 416 Canadians aged sixty and over who were enrolled in general-interest courses, and what they found cuts against the way most of us think about later-life learning.
The first time Gallup tested it, just 30% of employees said yes — and those who did turned out to be seven times as likely to be engaged at work.
"Each of us lives only in the present, this brief moment; the rest is either a life that is past, or is in an uncertain future." That's Marcus Aurelius, in the A.S.L. Farquharson translation, writing to himself nearly two thousand years ago in the private notebook we now call the Meditations.
I am not a psychologist, and what follows is reading and reflection on a handful of studies, not advice about your life.
A friend turned 52 last month and said the line everyone says eventually: "I don't feel 52." I have heard versions of this from people in their thirties, fifties, seventies.
Picture someone at the end of a long day.
A quick note: I am not an economist, a psychologist, or an organizational scientist.
In 1981, two psychologists published a short paper in the Journal of Organizational Behavior that quietly influences how a lot of us talk about being worn down by work.
In May, the former chief executive of Google stood at a podium at the University of Arizona, looked out at the class of 2026, and told them artificial intelligence was about to remake the world the way the computer once did.
In August 2019, Microsoft Japan closed its offices every Friday, gave its 2,300 staff a three-day weekend on full pay, and capped meetings at 30 minutes.
