Suggested readings, #144

Here it is, a rundown of interesting articles I’ve come across recently, to consider for your weekend readings:

How to not fear your death. Your demise is inevitable. I hope that doesn’t come as too much of a shock. I agree that the brevity of human existence is bothersome. Thankfully, for most of us, this frightful fact usually hovers somewhere beyond the margins of our consciousness: we’re ‘aware’ of our death without constantly fearing it. Inevitably, though, there are moments when the reality of our eventual death strikes us in a new, chillier light. A close call demonstrates the tenuousness of life, or the death of a loved one reminds us that no one is exempt from humanity’s ultimate destination. Even talking about death, as we are now, can be enough to bring on a ruminative contemplation of the end, and with it a shudder of fear about one’s own extinguishment. … (Psyche)

The morality of business and the risk of a dead planet. For Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever, the ultimate question for business leaders is this: is the world better off because your business is in it? It’s a simple question, with a straightforward yes-or-no answer. Yet, according to Polman and his co-author Andrew Winston, who just published the book “”, it is vital. It defines whether a business should – and will – exist at all in the future. For them, talking about the purpose and morality of business is as natural as talking about growth and profits. In fact, they say, the former should take precedence over the other. “It’s time to wake up from our fifty-year zombielike obsession with profits,” they write. “Shareholder value should be a result, not an objective.” Instead, companies should be “courageous”, and work to have a positive impact on society and the planet. … (London School of Economics Business Review)

The art movement that embraced the monstrous. To be on the internet today is to confront unsettling images—of war, climate change, humanitarian crises. Weird visuals crop up too. A YouTube algorithm provides me, for instance, with videos of a pimple-popping bonanza, or a series of videos in which young men eat glue. If disquieting sensory experiences abound in daily life, why go and seek more out? That question might be put to visitors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Surrealism Beyond Borders” exhibition, a show filled with grotesque representations of political upheaval and private horror, but also with thrillingly odd and beautiful demonstrations of imagination. … (Atlantic)

Do we really need to take 10,000 steps a day for our health? Fitness tracking devices often recommend we take 10,000 steps a day. But the goal of taking 10,000 steps, which many of us believe is rooted in science, in fact rests on coincidence and sticky history rather than research. According to Dr. I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an expert on step counts and health, the 10,000-steps target became popular in Japan in the 1960s. A clock maker, hoping to capitalize on interest in fitness after the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, mass-produced a pedometer with a name that, when written in Japanese characters, resembled a walking man. It also translated as “10,000-steps meter,” creating a walking aim that, through the decades, somehow became embedded in our global consciousness — and fitness trackers. … (New York Times)

This paradoxical life. Here is a dilemma you may find familiar. On the one hand, a life well lived requires security, safety and regularity. That might mean a family, a partner, a steady job. On the other hand, a life well lived requires new experiences, risk and authentic independence, in ways incompatible with a family or partner or job. Day to day, it can seem not just challenging to balance these demands, but outright impossible. That’s because, we sense, the demands of a good life are not merely difficult; sometimes, the demands of a good life actually contradict. ‘Human experience,’ wrote the novelist George Eliot in 1876, ‘is usually paradoxical.’ … (Aeon) [I must say that this, in my opinion, is one of the worst essays Aeon has ever published. The daily life examples make no sense, and I challenge you to read it and have any understanding of what paraconsistent logic is actually about.]