Look closer. This is what “change” looks like inside your brain: 1. Stop rehearsing disaster.

There is a mountain of unworn clothes in the driest desert on earth, large enough to be photographed from space. It grows by 39,000 tons a year and almost none of it will ever rot. The Atacama, in northern Chile, is a place where it may not rain for a decade. On its edge is a duty-free port called Iquique. Every year about 59,000 tons of clothing arrives there from Europe, America and Asia. It is last season's stock that never sold, and the bags people leave at charity shops. Dealers pick through it for anything they can resell across South America. Two thirds of it is worthless. Nobody will pay to ship it back out, so lorries drive it into the desert at night and tip it. The local landfill refuses to take it. The reason given is that the clothing does not biodegrade and is full of chemicals. Most of it is polyester, which is plastic, and in a place with no rain and no soil life it will lie there for centuries. Some of it is set alight, and the smoke drifts over a town of 100,000 people. In 2025 a Chilean court ruled that the dumps had done serious damage to the land. For most of history this could not have happened. Clothes were wool, linen and leather. They were worn out, handed down and patched, and at the very end a rag merchant paid for the scraps. In Yorkshire, from 1813, old woollens were shredded and spun into new cloth. Anything left went on the fields, where wool breaks down in months and feeds the grass. Nobody ever had to find a desert for worn-out wool. We invented a fabric that cannot die, and then we started making it to be thrown away.

This is what happens when you are dealing with a massive Kelvin wave...

The funniest song this year 🥳

Personal Kindness In 2015, I got to volunteer for the Dalai Lama when he came to Australia. My job was simple: usher people to their seats. Nobody would have called it important work. But I decided, quietly, that it was going to be the most important thing I did that year. Here’s the truth: I wanted to see him. Not in some detached, spiritual, above-it-all way. I wanted it the way you want to see someone famous, someone holy, someone who might look at you for half a second and change your whole life. I stood at my door on the first day with actual butterflies in my stomach. I had this strange, certain feeling… he was going to walk past me. Not the other door. Mine. I couldn’t explain it. I just knew it the way you know rain is coming before the sky says so. So I waited. I stopped ushering and started watching the hallway, quickly looking at tickets, my heart doing something embarrassing in my chest. And then a little old lady got lost. She needed someone to walk her to her seat. I could have pointed. I could have said “just down there, love” and kept my eyes on the door. God knows part of me wanted to. But I already knew what kindness costs, and what it costs is exactly this: the thing you wanted, traded for the thing someone else needed. I looped my arm through hers. We shuffled down the aisle together, slow enough that I felt every second of what I was giving up. And then something happened that I still don’t have language for. A peace moved through me. Not the peace of getting what I wanted… the opposite of that. A peace that filled some room in my chest I didn’t know was empty. It didn’t feel like disappointment at all. It felt like coming home to something. He did walk past my door, of course. The other volunteers got their moment. I got a lovely lady’s hand on my arm and a feeling I’ve spent years trying to describe. I never met the Dalai Lama. Not really. But I met something that day…. call it grace, call it my own soul finally getting my attention…and it planted the idea for this space you find yourself reading. I learned that kindness isn’t a lesson you get taught once. It’s a door that opens every single time you choose the smaller, quieter, less flattering option. And every time you walk through it, something in you gets a little more free. That’s the part nobody warns you about. Kindness doesn’t feel like sacrifice while you’re in it. It feels like relief. Like finally putting down something heavy you didn’t know you’d been carrying your whole life. kr 🤍

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They said getting old could be rough. But they didn't mention the heartbreaking, mind-blowing slow torture of every aspect of life part.

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up. He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour. Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself. Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it. Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows. Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result. Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing. The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.