Both sickness and health, it turns out, are contagious (Just like viruses, fitness and wellness fads such as Peloton and Zumba spread rapidly and then fade) – The Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2022
The analogies between Covid-19 and Peloton aren’t glib. A growing body of research suggests that health behaviors—from obesity to exercise and weight loss, from smoking to quitting smoking—are fundamentally contagious phenomena. The findings suggest exposure to norms and ideas through your social network could be a powerful predictor of your health, your weight, and even the stock prices of health and wellness companies linked to those things.
Doctors in the UK will now prescribe walking and cycling – The Guardian August 22, 2022
The UK government recently announced that GPs will now be prescribing activities such as walking and cycling as part of a new $14.5 million trial designed to ease the intense burden on the NHS, improve mental and physical wellness, and reduce widening health disparities across the country–the latest move in the wider “social prescribing” trend.
The unexpected power of random acts of kindness – The New York Times, September 2, 2022
When it comes to social connection, we tend to have a negativity bias. Yet, new scientific findings show that small gestures matter more than we may think. Researchers found that people who perform a random act of kindness tend to underestimate how much the recipient will appreciate it. They also believe that miscalculation could hold many of us back from doing nice things for others more often. In fact, kindness can even beget more kindness!
The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse––The Guardian, September 4, 2022
This is an edited extract from Survival of the Richest, Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book. Why did a group of very powerful investors and entrepreneurs ask a Marxist media theorist for advice about what’s coming? The article depicts in detail how tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers (complete with vertical farms, pools and gyms) and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse, which, as the author argues, “they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences.” As Rushkoff provocatively concludes: the future of technology is about one thing: tech entrepreneurs escaping from the rest of us.
A Striking Stat
People expect to spend between 4-5 hours a day in the metaverse within five years.
Source: McKinsey report, 6/2022 Read more
