Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
🏃🏼 You Can’t Simply Decide to Be a Different Person
I feel, often the role of personal circumstances and traits is not discussed in the popular narrative of ‘everyone can become a better person if they just try hard enough’. This article presents some interesting recent scientific findings on the matter.
According to Michael Inzlicht, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto, the most recent research suggests that conscious decision making plays a much more minor role in people’s actions than previously thought, and long-term behavior patterns largely aren’t created by stringing together a series of conscious choices. How people use the phrase self-control, he told me, tends to conflate two different things: a largely immutable element of someone’s personality (a trait) and a way that someone chooses to behave at a particular time (a state). Trait self-control varies from person to person, he said, and the amount you get is probably determined by some combination of heredity, culture, and environment. A person who has high trait self-control might be preternaturally punctual, whereas the timeliness track record of an average person—even one constantly trying hard to make it to things on time—might be more subject to the whims of circumstance.
🇺🇦 Kyiv diary: ‘Was I right not to leave?’
Article by an Ukrainian journalist about her ‘new life’ and the situation in Kyiv.
When I returned to Kyiv from the Munich Security Conference on February 20, a good friend suggested dinner at an expensive modern restaurant. At first I hesitated, but then I asked myself: what if war breaks out tomorrow? Don’t deny yourself. I ordered a green papaya salad and shrimp dumplings, and drank two glasses of good Italian wine. One week later I would be dining on sausage sandwiches and sleeping on the concrete floor of a metro platform every night.
🧓 Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research
Longevity (research) seems to have been entering the mainstream of discussion, at least in the tech & startup world - this article provides a good and interesting entry point to anyone new to the topic.
As you get older, the chance that you will die goes up. As you get older, the chance that you will die from certain diseases also goes up. Why does this happen? A simple explanation would be that, like an old car, you accumulate damage in a random fashion. However, there are many simple things that we can do to make animals live longer. Why? We don’t really know.
Eating less makes mice live longer. Some genes, when mutated, make mice live longer. A few drugs, approved for human use, also make mice live longer.
So what is the study of aging? I sum it up as the following: trying to figure out what kinds of damage accumulate with age, how to reverse that accumulation, and the search for switches that we could flip in human biology to increase lifespan.
Food for Thought.
⬛️ I guess no additional words needed here. More food for thought than I can handle.
Random Stuff.
🧑🚀 I made yet another trip to the Danish Architecture Museum - this time to see their exhibition on the ‘Lunark Habitat’, a foldable ‘home’ for space. Quite impressive - the architects themselves tested it through a 3 month expedition to Northern Greenland, financed via Kickstarter.
🧳 There exists a shop where you can buy unclaimed luggage.
🥞 A short reminder that there are also small, good & nice things happening out there and that one person can make a difference. This guy thought that people in his neighbourhood weren’t really interacting in a friendly way. So, he made pancakes for people on the street.
Personal Update.
Just feels extremely wrong to continue life as if there weren’t civilians being shot, families being separated and cities being bombed within the European borders. I guess, let’s try to hold our heads up nonetheless? I can recommend this page by Global Shapers Kyiv, where they collect information on ways foreigners can support Ukrainians.
Re-installed my Instagram. Reduced the amount of accounts I follow from 632 to 113 - despite Instagram trying to make this extra hard.
Completely different Social Media experience - scrolling through all new posts and stories literally takes half a minute max. So far, I can recommend it.