Alex Burns

Organize a weekly card game

Or a board game. Catan-heads stand up. A little competition, a couple hours of shooting the shit...this is the exact sort of thing we all once took for granted. Find a few reliable people in your orbit and bring it back. Bonus points if everyone agrees to leave their phones in their jacket.

But it was serving a function for you because that is one form of “like.” It’s what we call in linguistic speak a “quotative like,” and that “like” substitutes for the verb “to say.” What you are doing is saying, “I’m not telling you verbatim what the teacher said. I’m giving you sort of my subjective recall of what she said.” It’s a really useful... See more

the internet’s sprawling databases, real-time social-media networks, and globe-spanning e-commerce platforms have made almost everything immediately searchable, knowable, or purchasable—curbing the social value of sharing new things. Cultural arbitrage now happens so frequently and rapidly as to be nearly undetectable, usually with no extraordinary... See more

Perfectionism perpetuates an endless state of striving. It’s an affliction of futility, an addiction to finding masochistic refuge in the familiar hell of feeling insufficient. It might not feel good, but it feels like home.

Play on sports teams

Sports teams have a massive impact on emotional well-being. What could be healthier than running around with friends for an hour, possibly dipping in and out of the flow state, while your phone is stashed in a backpack? It’s even great when things aren’t going well. I watched a 50-year-old guy get thrown out of a softball game... See more

I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.” If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?”

If that’s a stumper, here are some followups:

• Which kind of

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Forty hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and sprint, then rest and reassess.

Thanks to the alleged love triangle, Rodrigo and Carpenter have that built in. They have very thinly veiled songs about each other — a territory some of those past “rivals” have never really ventured in.

But what makes the Rodrigo-Carpenter dynamic unique is that they’ve both figured out how to make the “rivalry” work in their favor, embracing their... See more