Rishita Chaudhary

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has assessed the connection between people’s habits and their subsequent well-being since the late 1930s.

The happiest, healthiest people in old age didn’t smoke (or quit early in life), exercised, drank moderately or not at all, and stayed mentally active , among other patterns. But these habits pale in compar

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How can each piece of ‘writing’ be more than the sum of its parts? In broadening this view of time, I find particular resonance in the text 10 Theses on the Archive, written by founding members of the Public Access Digital Media Archive (Pad.ma). “Don’t wait for the archive,” they say to us, because: “To not wait for the archive is to enter the riv... See more

“We’re going to perfect your body. We’re going to ensure that the moments of breakdown, the signs of aging and decay, are no longer part of your bodymind.”

A greater healthspan is another form of extending one’s productivity as well. Many people are unable to retire at an age that they would like to. Extending your life even further and having to so... See more

And salve it we must, yet there is no damnation greater than spending our allotted days in the catatonia of comfort and certainty, our inner lives automated by habit and halogen lit by convenience. To try to save ourselves from the despair by which we contour hope, to spare ourselves the fertile doubt and the gasps of self-surprise by which we disc... See more

“This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?” the young Leo Tolstoy distilled the eternal quest in his diary as he wrestled with moral development and the search for selfhood — a search that begins as soon as we become conscious, reaches a crescendo in the formative years of adolescence and young adulthood, and continues until ou... See more