When researchers asked the participants in the Harvard Study of Adult Development what they regretted most as they reached their seventies and eighties, very few said money. Almost no one said career. The most common regret, voiced again and again by people looking back across long lives, was ...Read More
At 77, you begin to notice patterns. Not the loud kind. Not the sort of patterns people write grand theories about. I mean the quiet ones. The ones you only see after enough cups of tea, enough walks around the same streets, enough phone calls with old friends, enough ...Read More
We love the idea that birth order explains us because it gives chaos a neat family label. The responsible firstborn. The forgotten middle child. The charming youngest. The mysterious only child who somehow becomes both independent and strange in everyone’s imagination. It is comforting, in a way. Families are complicated. Childhood is rarely ...Read More
My wife said something to me a few months ago that I haven't been able to shake. We were talking about a dinner we'd been to with friends in Saigon, and she said, casually, "You were doing that thing again." I asked what thing. "The thing where you agree with ...Read More
The first few weeks of retirement often feel like a long weekend. There is relief, rest, maybe some travel. The calendar is open and the mornings are yours. Then a month passes. The phone gets quieter. The people who used to be part of every day become people you ...Read More
There is a version of the dream that looks very convincing from the outside: a laptop on a café table, warm weather all year, no fixed schedule, the whole world available to you. You are free. You are interesting. You are living the life other people keep saying they ...Read More