Jennifer Baez

The hardest thing about this was that I loved the work. And I wanted to work hard. But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate. There is a name for this feeling. Psychologists call it reactance. Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, summed it up well:

A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose 

I love Voltaire’s observation that “History never repeats itself; man always does.” It applies so well to how we behave with money.

If you grew up when inflation was high, you invested less of your money in bonds later in life compared to those who grew up when inflation was low. If you happened to grow up when the stock market was strong, you

  The Gaia Theory sees planets, at least the Earth, as more than just balls of rocks and mud. They don’t think that Earth has life  on  it. They theorize that Earth is life itself — it’s living. The Gaia theory states that living things and all their non-living and inorganic surroundings evolve together as a single complex living organism. This

Such philosophies emphasize that we humans dwell within, not apart from, the network of felt relations, human and ecological, that shape our lives; and that we have possibilities for living creatively and compassionately amid these relations

The lowest-income households in the U.S. on average spend $412 a year on lotto tickets, four times the amount of those in the highest income groups. Forty percent of Americans cannot come up with $400 in an emergency. Which is to say: Those buying $400 in lottery tickets are by and large the same people who say they couldn’t come up with $400 in an