In a world where more is deemed better — more success, more money, more followers, more of more — choosing less seems highly contradicting.

Over the past year, I’ve proudly identified as a minimalist. Most of my family and acquaintances dig it, and some of them tease me about it. To some, having under 100 pieces of clothing or a shower that contains only one type of soap and one shampoo is deemed impossible (especially from the women in my life) or a sign of light obsessive-compulsiveness.

Minimalism is a movement that has skyrocketed in the past few years, and…

Sundays go in one of two ways. Either we spend our day consumed by tasks and our low-grade anxiety, or we spend the day relaxing and recuperating before a successful week ahead.

Sundays are the first day of a new week, considered as a day of rest in most countries. A slow Sunday works wonders on the stressed body and mind, and all you need to do is follow the advice of Sunday self-care professionals.

These people have successful weeks not only because they are highly productive, but because they are also highly proactive about their rest.

I discovered which…

When left alone to ourselves and the empty silence of our homes, we tend to lose ourselves in our thoughts. While initially, most of us enjoy the peace and quiet of introversion, there comes a time where we succumb to the rabbit hole of our fears and our worries.

And one of the most common ways we respond to stress is to bury ourselves with things that distract us from our ailments and our fears.

So what did we do from March 14th to today?

We shopped online, constantly. We had countless Amazon packages delivered to our door. We responded…

I recently came across an article by Andreas Kluth, one of my favorite columnists, explaining how the prevalence of anxiety and depression in young adults over the past 6 months has climbed through the roof.

As COVID-19 uprooted any budding life plans young adults had been nursing, America’s national anxiety rates tripled compared to 2019 (from 8.1% to 25.5%). In Britain, depression rates have nearly doubled, from 9.7% of adults before the pandemic to 19.2% in June.

“Perhaps more pertinently, older adults had already built their lives before the pandemic — with routines, structures, careers and relationships to fall back…

Every headline with the word “routine” in it boasts that those who do not have one will never reach their full potential.

They aren’t necessarily wrong: having a routine has become synonymous with healthy lifestyle habits and productivity. This is also why many people are taken aback if I tell them that their routine is actually a liability.

A collection of obligatory steps that bind you to an unspoken agreement and turns your day into shambles the moment something out of your control happens, to me, is the furthest thing from productivity.

Let me explain:

While rituals are a source of grounding, they are also a form of fragility.

Charles Duhrigg’s book The Power…

According to Paul Graham, people can be categorized into 2 types: managers and makers. Managers structure their days for meetings, calls, and administrative tasks. Makers, on the other hand, leave large blocks of uninterrupted, unscheduled time to do what they do best: create and live intentionally.

So how do you make time for family, reading, walking the dog, meditating, working out, and running your side project alongside a 9 to 5 job? You learn to keep a spacious maker’s schedule, and more importantly: you learn to say no.

For a word that’s so short to spell, it’s an awfully difficult…

We place such an important emphasis on societal productivity. We glorify productive habits and give them such a high worth, creating a sort of illusion where we think productivity is the direct highway to success.

Evidently, I agree — productivity plays a huge role in our capacity to work efficiently. But if our productivity isn’t preceded by inspiration, it is really worth anything?

Ironically, we have all the tools we need to develop efficient productivity practices. While we know exactly which blogs, books, and podcasts to turn to when we need motivation, meaningful inspiration is much harder to find.

How…

Many years ago, a man named Denis Diderot — a French philosopher, art critic, and writer —went about his life the way any man would in the 1750s.

At the time, Diderot had just co-created l’Encyclopédie, one of the most comprehensive encyclopedias of its era. However, its secularity angered both religious and political authorities, eventually leading to its banishment in 1758. Due to the fact that he received very little recognition for his work, Diderot struggled financially throughout most of his career.

This was until Russian Empress Catherine the Great decided to pay him 50,000 francs (approximately $50,000 USD) to…