As of writing, I had just turned 27 years old — my first, and hopefully last pandemic birthday.

This health crisis has slowed down what would have been a flurry of activity for 20-somethings. This defining decade is supposed to be a time for chasing and realizing desires — Career growth and side-hustles. Licensure. Rock-solid abs. Financial security. The opportunity to travel, meet new people, and learn new things. We want to be more sure of ourselves, of what we want, and where we’re going. …

The words that changed my outlook came from, of all places, a presentation on workplace safety at my new job. “Always report the near misses,” the facilitator said, as a slide showed a couple of boxes falling off a forklift and narrowly missing the man standing underneath it.

When I saw the image, I flinched. But then I thought, “Wow, lucky guy.”

This past year has been a string of near misses for me. My sister, a doctor, tested positive for Covid-19 but had an asymptomatic case. Soon after switching jobs, I learned that my former company would be shuttering…

Is it Christmas? Is that snow outside my window?

Is that really not one, but two e-mails on Medium payday — telling me I was getting a whopping $500 dollars on top of last month’s earnings (Okay, technically it’s $425 because of international tax. But as with any job offer, the face value makes it feel so much nicer)?

The Medium gang on Whatsapp were flipping the whole night while I slept (Screw these timezones!)

But yes, it’s real. Not the snow, sadly (I suddenly remembered I lived in a tropical country). …

“Y.O.L.O!”, rallied the wide-eyed millennial generation.

We only live once. And we all just want to live that one life to the hilt. Yet, ironically, we seldom recognize, much less address the one behavior that keeps us from achieving that: overconsumption.

The urge to overconsume pervades our daily lives in different forms. A half-slice of cake turns into half the cake. Another online sale! You can finally get those cute athleisure sets you couldn’t buy in last week’s haul! Life is short, after all.

At least for eating and shopping, the costs are obvious. But there are other forms of…

Fitness. When you hear the word, you’d probably imagine something like the photo above. Then you think about what it took for that woman to get there. Then comes all the layers, methods, and demands of what’s considered a fit and healthy lifestyle.

But recently, I realized that fitness is actually pretty simple. And it can be summed up in two words that I learned back in High School as a cheerleader.

But Howes and Rosberg came to a conclusion about Brady that I’ll never forget: “Successful people aren’t superhuman. They’re just super intentional.”

As a flyer (the girl that…

At 170 miles per hour, the Mercedes car slid off the track, went into the gravel, and hit the wall of the Imola race circuit.

The seven-time Formula 1 world champion baffled commentators with his grave, rare error. The screen read: “Lewis Hamilton has not had a DNF (Did Not Finish) since 2018”. And everybody thought the race was over for him.

But Hamilton was having none of that. Instead, he showed us exactly why he’s considered one of the Greatest Of All Time. He proved that a G.O.A.T. …

“Unity is the anchor of good writing”, says William Zinsser. He continues:

Unity not only keeps the reader from straggling off in all directions; it satisfies your readers’ subconscious need for order and reassures them that all is well at the helm.

It also helps us, writers, keep our wits about us, as we navigate through the chaos of our thoughts and the immensity of our ideas.

We all get stuck in the writing process. But if we really think about it, most of those problems can be traced back to a few core matters — or what Zinsser calls…

Nowadays, conversing with the other side feels like a lost cause. You want to stay hopeful. To believe that this divisive mess has not completely rendered this society unable to hear each other. Yet, as much as you’d like to speak up and be heard, engaging feels as if you’d be walking into a battleground.

But that’s probably why we never seem to get anywhere, says three-time world debate champion Julia Dhar in a recent TED talk. In a war zone, the agenda is to win. There’s no space to listen, much less to understand each other. …