Why being near water can feel emotionally restorative
There is a particular feeling that arrives before the holiday has properly started.
Relationships & Society
Relationships, identity and social behaviour, including how institutions and technologies reshape the way people live together.
625 articles · Relationships & Society
The truth about 10,000 steps a day: the number wasn’t science, it was the brand…
The daily step goal on hundreds of millions of wrists and phones did not come out of a laboratory.
Psychologist Carl Rogers suggested the good life is not a state you arrive at but…
I have caught myself, more than once, defending a version of me that had already moved on.
Why retirement can reveal gaps in a social network
When someone reaches retirement age without close friends, the easy assumption is that they must have pushed people away.
Thought of the day by Helen Mirren: “You die young or you get old. There’s nothing…
For most of human history, the average person did not live to see their thirty-fifth birthday.
A whole generation of parents is learning to be grandparents over video call…
A quiet revolution has happened in family life over the last few years, and most of us slid into it without ever deciding to.
A lot of men reach their sixties having built their entire sense of usefulness on…
Surveys of retired men in the UK and US consistently find the same uncomfortable pattern: a significant share report a loss of purpose, identity, or self-worth within the first two years of leaving structured work.
Older adults who stop dyeing their hair, stop hosting holidays, and stop…
What looks like older adults giving up — letting hair go grey, declining to host, going to bed early — is usually the opposite: the quiet end of decades of social performance that earlier life couldn't afford to drop.
Somewhere a grandchild is living through the ordinary afternoon they’ll describe…
Ask an adult when they felt safest in their whole life and a striking number of them will not name a wedding day or a graduation or a birthday.
People expect marriage to get harder with age, but many couples describe the…
My husband's grandparents have been married forty-three years, and the clearest picture I have of their marriage is the two of them at the kitchen counter on a Sunday morning.
The lost art of being unreachable (and how to get a little of it back)
I am not a psychologist or a doctor, and this should not be taken as advice.
Thought of the day by Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “What does not benefit…
Picture the colleague who quietly keeps the best leads for himself.