Throughout history, societies have often glorified pursuits and behaviors that can be expected to shave many years off your natural life expectancy.
If you hold a leadership role of any type (and you probably do — whether at home, in school, at work or in the community more broadly), it’s good practice to pause once in a while and reflect on how well you’re doing on that front. But what’s the relevant frame of reference against which to assess yourself?
“Do we want a market economy, or a market society?” That is the uncomfortable question that philosopher Michael J. Sandel asks at the beginning of What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, first published in 2012.
We all face choices and trade-offs, it’s just part of life. Some are small and (likely) inconsequential – like picking between the pear and the custard at the dessert table last night.
In Canada, November is Financial Literacy Month and 2020 marks the 10th anniversary of this important national initiative. The focus of this year’s campaign, quite appropriately, is “to help Canadians learn how to manage their finances in challenging times.”
Work can be hard and it definitely has its highs and lows. But for many people, pride in a job well done ranks right up there in terms of what gives meaning to their lives. Does work get the respect it deserves for the reasons it should?
I wade today into the fraught topic of systemic racism and discrimination. I do so because I believe systemic racism exists and that it can be fought. It is my contention in this article that when a minority faces systemic disadvantages, which are the flip side of the dominant group’s entrenched privileges, good will and warm feelings alone are not sufficient to disrupt the status quo.
Like all of you, I’ve been coming across more and more articles about how the world is about to change as a result of the pandemic. With titles like “Ten Ways Your Life Will Never Be the Same” or “Twenty Changes Coming to the Workplace”, such articles purport to enlighten us about the post-pandemic world that lies just beyond our doorstep.
Social distancing measures have been in full effect for weeks and legions of people have retreated – more or less happily – to the relative safety of their homes. Workplaces and public spaces that used to teem with people lie eerily empty and many employees – fortunate ones for whom telecommuting proved possible – have carried on with their professional lives in a strange virtual world where newly disembodied organizations large and small continue to operate.
What we are attempting, as far as I know, has never been done. Some microorganisms such as yeasts, fungi and bacteria can go completely dormant for periods of time that can stretch over thousands of years, a phenomenon known as super-long anabiosis: a glacier moves in, the bacteria go into a deep freeze; the glacier pulls back ten thousand years later, the bacteria go back to their business.
