Happy Wednesday, email chums. Usually, the weekly entry into the 💥BLAST! playlist follows the theme of these emails. This week though, it’s the other way around; I have an unshakable earworm. Thanks a lot, Soulwax. Love you really.
💌 Share 💥BLAST! with someone who’ll appreciate it, and give the gift of interestingness. 😘
Work healthy: For many people, for many reasons, work is changing. In many places there’s a view that you develop a profession and then stay in your lane but, in not very many years, I expect people living and working this way will be quite exceptional.
There are a few ways in which that’s interesting; the one that grabs me is the impact more a turbulent working life will have on our wellbeing. Could that impact in fact be positive, given that four in ten adults are close to ‘breaking point’ at work? In some places, like the UK, attitudes to mental wellbeing at work have never been more enlightened, but the rate of tangible change is relatively slow. In others, like the US, a mental health issue is not yet seen as an acceptable reason for time off.
Even though the causes of work-related mental health issues are well-understood, there persists a mental health crisis both for overworked employees and entrepreneurs alike. While the total removal of work stress would be counter-productive, the quasi-religious concept of workism, the all-consuming career, is misery-making. 🤒
🏙 Get Out of Town: an examination of celebrating urbanisation, and whether it has gone too far. Certain things happen easier in urban environments, such as cultural or artistic movements, but cities and the trend of urbanisation also have considerable drawbacks.
✋ The Rejection Lab: What can researching human responses to rejection tell us about ourselves?
🖥 Inc.’s 1981 Cover Story: Steve Jobs, the Man Who Changed Business Forever: an archive article profiling just as his company’s own product—the personal computer—disrupts how the youthful Apple Computer does business.
✏️ Reading with a pencil: Austin Kleon looks at marginalia, the practice of notating books as you read them.
📄 Google’s Paper Phone is an experiment in digital detox: faced with the fallout of smartphones making us unhappy, here’s Big Tech experimenting with first design principles. Returning to paper is an interesting concept, but overlooks the dramatic commoditisation of social interaction that the smartphone has enabled.
🍁 Risks of cannabis use for mental health treatment outweigh benefits: a newly-published of evidence over 40 years concludes the downsides are too great to justify such treatments. Better to stick to the painkillers and fish oil.
It’s good to talk: As the work environment evolves, there’s good odds the workism trend will be disrupted, as having people in the office for long periods will become more problematic than beneficial. This could be a good thing, as there are many reasons people need flexibility in their relationship with work.
While any decent employer figures out how to help employees address mental health issues, and one CEO offers bonuses to those who fully unplug while on holiday, many mental health at work initiatives lack insight and dexterity. What’s more, talking to each other in the tough times isn’t yet normalised in professional environments. 💬
Finally: How to Solve a Rubik’s Cube, Step by Step: I got one for Christmas, and by Easter I’d solved it. This then made me realise that what I really wanted was to be able to solve it quickly. 🤔