As a rapidly aging fellow, of course I am naturally drawn to any shred of evidence that my best years are not, in fact, behind me. This thoughtful Atlantic article about late bloomers includes plenty of anecdotal evidence of people who peaked late, not early, which is some small comfort. However, after the initial dopamine hit of potentially not being washed wore off, there were even deeper insights to enjoy, like this great quote:

We have a notion that the happiest people are those who have aimed their life toward some goal and then attained it, like winning a championship trophy or achieving renown. But the best moments of life can be found within the lifelong learning or quest itself. It’s doing something so fulfilling that the work is its own reward. “Effort is the one thing that gives meaning to life,” the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote. “Effort means you care about something.”

That gives hope to us olds, almost-olds, or seriously-olds! Because that means as long as there is an ounce of life left, that’s a scoop of effort left to put toward something worthwhile.

So…
What have pursuits or goals have you put the most effort toward in the last year? Or in your life as a whole?

If you could take back some of that effort and reassign it to something else, what would you choose? Why did you make that original choice, and why would you change it?

What would you love to spend more effort on in the future that you aren’t already?

All those moments will be lost in time… like tweets in rain.

There is a constant tension between our desire to live every day like it’s our last — to maximize our impact on this world and the joy we find in it — and our tendency to do the opposite, by frittering away precious time doing mundane, pointless, unfulfilling things. Well, there’s an app for that.

“Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

…

As I scroll through Instagram or refresh Twitter, WeCroak interrupts with the sobering reminder that it is not just my attention these other apps are consuming, but chunks of my life.”

The simplicity is beautiful, if potentially morbid. And don’t count out the fact that it may have the opposite effect on the more jaded among us, who find the comfort of an inevitable end a source of relief.

Would you get anything out of an app like this?

How might these reminders affect your daily behavior?

What other “tech” with such a clear and simple purpose do you wish existed?

Now the coworkers you can’t stand and the roommates that drive you nuts can be the SAME PEOPLE.

Buzzfeed News has a long piece about a potential new trend that builds on the trendy shared “co-working” spaces so hot with the hopeful startup crowd. Apparently the next step is “co-living”:

Co-living offers up the same short-term leases and the same promises as co-working, except community members (it is always a “community”) get a bed instead of a desk. In both cases, practitioners sacrifice space for proximity to like-minded people and access to perks. WeLive and Common and The Caravanserai and their ilk purport, essentially, to do for the home what WeWork has already done for the office: Sweat the small stuff. Make you feel like a boss. Feed your body and your intellect. “WE TAKE CARE OF ALL THE ‘STUFF’, SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO ANYMORE,” The Caravanserai’s Haid promises on his website; the impossible-to-spell startup says it’s geared toward “professionals who seek a great work life balance and don’t want to waste time piecing it together themselves.”

In typical startup fashion, the promise is not having to do any normal boring human stuff, so you have more time to focus on bringing your brilliant ideas into the world. But also, erasing the line (and that bothersome transition) between work and non-work, since when you’re changing the world, isn’t it all about the work, man?

Is erasing the division between work and life by living and working in the same place just another step on a terrible trajectory?

Or are the people who love what they do so much that it becomes their whole reason for being actually the ones we should be envious of?

What kind of people would you want to work with, or what kind of project would you want to work on, that would make this setup a good thing?