It’s not news that smartphones are addictive. There have been many studies that have validated the seductive lure of smartphones. One study noted that 47% of people in a large survey admit that they are addicted. 71% check their phones within 10 minutes of waking. 45% say that their phone is their most valuable possession, and on average Americans check their phones 344 times a day. That’s over 20 times in each waking hour, or once every 3 minutes. And that’s an average!
There is not much gender difference when it comes to addiction. If anything, women and girls are … Read More

The thesis of this article is that fishing and hunting are ways that men (and women) can seek meditative quiet, commune with nature, and spend intimate time with friends. Of course women can fish and hunt, and I’m sure some do, but traditionally these are activities associated with men; one website claimed that 90% of hunters are men. I personally have never hunted, although my father took me fishing once or twice. But I’ve known many men who remember hunting or fishing trips with their Dad as important and memorable bonding experiences.
The other aspect of hunting, especially, is that … Read More

Before I begin, a caveat: this essay is not just for the over-65 set. People of all ages are aging, and wistfulness can be a feature of any age. But the older you are, the more wistfulness seeps slowly into your awareness, like a subtle fragrance.
That said, I hope that the over-65s, even the over-50s, will follow along with me; I think it will be worthwhile. I write regularly about aging, and have written a couple of books about the subject. I am 75, so the topic is not theoretical for me, or for many of my friends. In … Read More

I have recently learned a new term: “porch sitting.” This term even has its own Wikipedia article—which surprised me. It means exactly what the words imply: sitting on your porch, often in a rocking chair, perhaps sipping a cool drink, and watching the world and your neighbors go by. Porch sitting is not just a leisure activity, it is, or used to be, incorporated in the necessary architectural design of houses. Before air conditioning, before television and computers, in the evening the often screened-in porch was often cooler than indoors, and urban planners liked the idea of the front … Read More

I have recently learned a new term: “doom-scrolling.” Doom-scrolling is obsessively scrolling through your phone or computer reading news stories or social media posts about catastrophic events—climate change, mass shootings, hate crimes, political strife—the list goes on. Covid has made this worse. During the two years of Covid we had to include reading all the terrible stories about crowded hospital wards with people on ventilators gasping for air. I confess that on bad days I have yielded to the temptation to doom-scroll, and had to hold myself back from the habit and give myself a news holiday.
Now it seems … Read More

Back in the 1980s, Small Is Beautiful, a book by contrarian British economist E.F. Schumacher, became trendy among counterculture intellectuals. Schumacher posited that the conventional understanding of capitalist economics, based on ever-increasing growth and wealth creation, was wrong and would lead to planetary degradation. That was over forty years ago—before the internet, before social media, before climate change and all the planetary crises of today that made Schumacher look like a prophet and sage. As it often is with prophets, his salient words were largely ignored. It’s interesting how some forward-thinking ideas have cachet for a brief time, and then … Read More

It isn’t major news, it doesn’t hog the headlines. It’s just one of many news stories about how we are polluting the whole planet. But it can now be said that even in its remotest corners, the ocean floor is littered with junk—fishing nets, sunken ships, machinery parts, fuel tanks—the list is endless. According to a recent National Geographic article, the strait between Sicily and Italy is the most polluted area of marine litter in the world. Some areas there have a density more than a million objects per square kilometer. The article goes on to say that the … Read More

To answer the title’s question: of course meditation is still possible, even desirable, but perhaps not in the way people often think of meditation. I was introduced to meditation through Buddhism in the 1960s, when the Beatles sang, “Meditation gives you peace of mind.” That’s what we thought then, that meditation could do that. And the youth of that era had a lot of anxieties to content with—the Vietnam War being just one of them. We were also anxious about nuclear war; I remember marching down Fifth Avenue in New York with a million people in the Nuclear Freeze march … Read More

I am alive today because of world-class medical care. In the 1980s I was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer that used to be 100% fatal within six months. But I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to some of the world’s best hospitals and medical schools. My cancer cell type was identified by a pathology professor at Stanford who wrote the textbook on diagnosing the disease, after first being mis-diagnosed at my local hospital. My cancer doctor had sent a tissue sample to him for a second opinion. Without his second (correct) opinion, I would be dead. I … Read More

Here’s a fact you may not know: Americans eat 50 billion hamburgers a year. That’s billion, not million. That comes to about 3.5 a week for every individual, or somewhat more if you exclude very young children (and maybe we shouldn’t, children love hamburgers). Do you eat 3 hamburgers a week? I don’t. Some other Americans must be eating our hamburgers to make the average work. In fact, it may be that, excluding people who don’t eat hamburgers, the weekly average of people who do is closer to 4 or even 5. Worldwide, annual hamburger consumption is 130 billion. These … Read More