What's on Your Mind?

In a world of hustle culture and stressors of all kinds, joy can seem both illusive and impossible. But despite barriers, you can create the conditions for happiness. Well-being and joy are critical issues today, with 69% to 77% of Americans feeling stressed about factors like the economy, current events, violence, and lack of connections, according to the American Psychiatric Association. In addition, a global mental health study of 17,000 people across 16 countries by Ipsos/AXA found that 64% face stress, 43% are suffering from depression, and only 25% of people are flourishing. But strategies for “micro joy” can be a solution to the struggles and a way to build…

Michelle had barely knotted her apron strings before the day turned ugly. “When I told her I could only serve regular coffee—not the waffle-flavored one she wanted—she threw the boiling-hot pot at me,” she tells Fast Company, recounting one violent encounter with a customer. Working at a popular all-day breakfast chain, Michelle has learned that customer “service” often means surviving other people’s rage: “I’ve been cussed out, had hot food thrown on me…even dodged a plate thrown at my head,” she says. Lately, the sexual comments from male customers have gotten worse. (Workers in this story have been given pseudonyms to protect them from retaliation.) Still,…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Earlier this month, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) released its annual survey, which found that the median age of first-time U.S. homebuyers in 2025 climbed to 40. That’s up from 38 in 2024—and far above the median age in 1992, when it was 28. At first glance, it appears that deteriorating housing affordability—driven by the Pandemic Housing Boom and the 2022 mortgage-rate shock—has pushed the age of first-time buyers higher. However, when you look across other data sources, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the U.S. Cens…

If you slip a tiny wearable device on your fingertip and slide it over a smooth surface like a touchscreen, you can feel digital textures like denim or mesh. The device, designed by researchers at Northwestern University, is the first of its kind to achieve “human resolution,” meaning that it can more accurately match the complex way a human fingertip senses the world. In previous attempts at haptic devices like this, “once you compare them to real textures, you realize there’s something still missing,” says Sylvia Tan, a PhD student at Northwestern and one of the authors of a new study in Science Advances about the research. “It’s close, but not quite there. Our …

Picture the scene. You’ve advertised a job on LinkedIn and received applications from around Europe. The perfect candidate lives in one of the world’s top tech cities—Paris, Berlin, or Amsterdam, for instance. Your company is based somewhere in Europe, so hiring them should be easy, right? Unfortunately, no. Despite their geographical proximity, countries in Europe still vary significantly in their hiring rules and regulations, making it hard to compliantly pay cross-border workers. Let’s take a closer look at the problem. So close, yet so far There’s naturally a certain amount of friction in terms of labor law compatibility between European states in…

For the 150th episode of my award-winning podcast series, FUTURE OF XYZ, I sat down with Nick Foster, former head of design at Google X and leading futures designer. We quickly found common ground in our strong belief that society doesn’t think about the future in the right way. ​​Too often, the future is reduced to flashy visions, both in media headlines and through messages from leading corporations. The future feels like a sci-fi movie that still seems far away. Nick and I both believe the future isn’t some distant fantasy, but rather a tomorrow already unfolding before us. To prepare, we must pay closer attention to what we know now and how people are acting today. Wh…

There are certain things that make it obvious that you are a working parent. And I am not talking about the bags under your eyes or the six cups of coffee needed to get through the day. It usually happens at 4:59 p.m. when they start to pack up so they can make it to daycare or a school recital or any number of obligations parents have. As they slip out of the open-plan cubicle maze, a child-free colleague glances over and thinks (or sometimes says out loud), “Must be nice.” Welcome to the us versus them of modern work life: parents versus nonparents, aka committed versus distracted or the all-in versus the always juggling. In my book How to Have a Kid and a Life, I w…

You can’t help but feel uneasy when looking at market concentration. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla now make up more than a third of the S&P 500, more than twice the level seen before the dot-com bust. AI-related capital spending has outpaced the U.S. consumer as the main driver of gross domestic product growth. OpenAI alone plans trillions in data-center investments while exiting 2025 with about $20 billion in annualized revenue. Of course, there are physical limitations to how fast we can build. Data centers require enormous energy, land, and skilled labor—more than trade schools produce today—a concern raised in the The President ad…

Discussions around the role of work in our lives are frequently divided into two camps. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”, one side proclaims. The other: “A job just needs to pay the bills.” The first school of thought is an example of “intrinsic motivation”. Here, the enjoyment of work for work’s sake is motivating enough, rather than relying on external rewards like money or praise. And while it’s great to love your job, recent research suggests that it can become problematic when intrinsic motivation is regarded as morally superior to other motivations. “When a neutral preference becomes charged with moral meaning, social scientists c…

We’re living through a seismic workforce disruption. Business leaders are poised to have a significant impact on the way our economy is shaped over the next decade. You already see it with the big company CEOs creating a cult of celebrity far beyond anything we’ve seen historically, but this phenomenon cascades down to all leaders across companies. Today, however, your personal brand is built in authentic micro-moments—how you lead meetings, navigate change, and bring others along. What story are you telling? Earlier this month, I sat down with Marissa Andrada and Al Dea at Guild’s Opportunity Summit to discuss why personal brand building is no longer optional for leader…

After Thanksgiving, brands will bombard you with Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions. It can be overwhelming to know what to buy. After all, some deals aren’t actually all that good. And besides, you don’t want to make impulse buys that you’ll regret later and that will end up in a landfill in the near future. To help cut through the noise, we’ve picked out the best deals from design-forward brands. They create beautiful products that are thoughtfully designed to last for years. We’ve even picked out some of our favorite classic products that you will enjoy using for a long time. All the prices below are before discounts. MoMA Design Store 20% off sit…

For many people, the first time they thought about Kalshi—a prediction market where you can place bets on the outcomes of sports, politics, culture, weather, and much more—was after a video clip of its cofounder, Tarek Mansour, went viral last week. Speaking on stage at the Citadel Securities Future of Global Markets Conference, the moderator Molly O’Shea asked, “Tarek, you’ve mentioned multiple times that you think prediction markets will be bigger than the stock market. What is it going to take to become a $1 trillion asset class?” In response, Mansour said, “You know, ‘Kalshi’ is ‘everything’ in Arabic. The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create…