Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.It is true that most people---yours truly included---try to build up their wealth to a point where it provides protection against the exigencies of life. It's very difficult to "sell what you own, and give the money to the poor" and trust in God to take care of our future.
Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!”
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| Perhaps the importance of "which road do I take" is not the decision but the fact there are at least two roads (WSJ/Carole Hénaff) |
But the truth, though it often makes people indignant to hear it, is that it’s almost never literally the case that you have to meet a work deadline, honor a commitment, answer an email, fulfill a family obligation or anything else. The astounding reality—in the words of Sheldon B. Kopp, a genial and brilliant American psychotherapist who died in 1999—is that you’re pretty much free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.The benefit of the I-really-do-have-a-choice perspective may have an effect on one's psychological well-being.
Consequences aren’t optional. Every choice you make comes with some sort of consequences, because at any instant you can only pick one path, and must deal with the repercussions of not picking any of the others. Spending a week’s holiday in Rome means not spending that same week in Paris. Avoiding a conflict in the short term means letting a bad situation fester.
Freedom isn’t a matter of somehow wriggling free of the costs of your choice—that’s never an option. It means realizing that nothing can stop you from doing anything at all, so long as you’re willing to pay those costs. Unless you’re being physically coerced into doing something, the notion that you “have to” do it just means that you don’t want to pay the price of refusing to do it. After all, it’s perfectly possible for you to quit your job with no backup plan. You could book a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro, or rob a bank, or tell your social media followers your honest views.
The economist Thomas Sowell summed things up by saying that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The only questions to ask about any choice is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.
If a path you’d love to take is genuinely likely to leave you destitute, or seriously harmed in some other way, then you probably shouldn’t take it. But for most of us, if we’re being honest with ourselves, the temptation is often to exaggerate potential consequences, so as to spare ourselves the burden of making a bold choice. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed that there’s a secret comfort in telling yourself you’ve got no options, because it’s easier to wallow in feeling trapped than to face the dizzying responsibilities of freedom...Thanksgiving will soon be here, and, although circumstances stay the same, changing our viewpoint toward life is a glass half full instead of a glass half empty makes all the difference in our feelings about the world.
Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of facing the consequences, the result will be freedom—not freedom from limitation, which is something we unfortunately never get to experience, but freedom in limitation. Freedom to examine the trade-offs—because there will always be trade-offs—and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.
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| (Illustration by Verplancke/WSJ) |
A team of researchers have found that “humorbragging”—referring to your accomplishments through a veil of humor—allows people to play up their skills without coming across as smug or conceited. And that makes them more likely to get hired or get their pitch accepted...Speaking from personal experience (okay, missteps) it's really tough to be funny, especially in a business setting.
The researchers used a series of studies to test the impact of what they called humorbragging. In one instance, they sent out two résumés to 345 companies—but one version of the résumé added a dash of self-promotional humor instead of being purely serious: “The more coffee you can provide, the more output I will produce.” The résumés with the joke got an email or a callback by 156 companies, versus 125 for the others.
Another study got similar results when looking at humorous bragging on the first four seasons of “Shark Tank”—people who used humor to highlight their accomplishments were more likely to get funding than others.
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| John Travolta wears the iconic T-shirt (SFGate/YouTube screenshot) |
“The Fiat [slug] is like the logo,” said [Jason] Cohen of the UCSC bookstore. “It’s a cartoon banana slug wearing glasses and reading Plato. It’s our best-selling logo, period. We sell it in many different capacities. I put that on academic planners and notebooks and all kinds of stuff.”Last month we noted how the banana slug has been named the official California state slug.
Among all the slug merch available, the Fiat Slug T-shirts remain the school’s top seller, by far, Ray Rideout, UCSC’s apparel buyer, told SFGATE. “Everyone gets it,” he said. “Anyone who’s seen the movie, it was the cleaner scene, right? When people — they find out where I work, they always send a picture of Travolta wearing it.”
In 2010 Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton analyzed data from over 450,000 responses to a daily survey of 1,000 U.S. residents by the Gallup Organization. They found that money does influence happiness at low to moderate levels of income. Real lack of money leads to more worry and sadness, higher levels of stress, less positive affect (happiness, enjoyment, and reports of smiling and laughter) and less favorable evaluations of one’s own life. Yet most of these effects only hold for people who earn $75,000 a year or less. Above about $75,000, higher income is not the simple ticket to happiness that we think it is.
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| (WSJ illustration) |
A big raise provides significant boosts in happiness even at household incomes of $500,000, according to a new research report...according to a paper by Matt Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the bonuses and leaps in income high earners reap are so large that they keep adding to well-being in the same way that smaller pay bumps do at lower tiers of earnings.It makes sense that more money always makes people happier, ceteris paribus.
“I think of this as a ladder across society. The rungs are separated by more and more dollars, but exactly the same amount of happiness,” said Killingsworth, who published his report on his Happiness Science website.
An academic paper in 2010 popularized $75,000 as the salary threshold beyond which earning more money didn’t make people any happier. More recent research indicates that there is no such plateau.
Killingsworth and other researchers stress that many things influence human happiness, including your relationships, your job and the country you live in.
“No single factor, including money, dominates the equation,” Killingsworth said.
Previous studies on money and happiness have consistently demonstrated two things: that richer people are happier, and that it takes progressively more money to keep generating a well-being boost of a given size.
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| Peter Hemsley prepares a dry-aged blue fin tuna steak (Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle) |
Less than two years after Aphotic opened and drew acclaim in San Francisco, the fine dining restaurant will close.Mayor Breed and other San Francisco boosters are trying to make us believe that San Francisco has put the worst of homelessness, crime, open-air drug use, and general filth behind it.
Aphotic, which won a Michelin star in its first year of operation, announced on Instagram that it will close on Dec. 21. Chef Peter Hemsley said despite the accolades, the restaurant’s location at 816 Folsom St. in SoMa proved challenging.
“The fact that we all did this at the ugly butt end of a desolate convention center suck hole in the post-panny apocalypse, is nothing short of a small miracle,” he wrote. “And I believe in miracles — I have to as a chef and restaurant owner in these times. But I also know that miracles do not last forever.”
In an email to the Chronicle, he wrote, “The energy may come back to that part of town in the years to come, but it will be a long and painful battle. Longer, much longer than anyone expected.”
Hemsley, an alum of the Michelin-starred Quince, opened the moody Aphotic last March in the former home of Palette, his combination art gallery-fine dining restaurant. It served an ambitious, seafood-focused tasting menu and standout cocktails. Aphotic is one of the rare restaurants with a license that allows it to distill its own spirits, producing a seaweed-infused gin...
Aphotic's dry-aged blue fin tuna steak (Suzuki/Chronicle)
In an email to supporters announcing the closure, Hemsley wrote that he “stayed put where I am because I was always charmed by the architecture of my restaurant, and the potential it had as an exceptional dining venue from within." Yet he said he increasingly felt the city failed to address post-pandemic challenges in Aphotic’s neighborhood. In the message, he cited “fear of parking on the street due to broken windows,” construction and other issues, coupled with the rising costs of doing business.
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| (Illustration: Jemal R. Brinson/WSJ) |
“Inflammaging” sounds like just another marketing buzzword wellness companies are throwing around. You would be wise to take the condition seriously.Finding effective treatments for inflammation/inflammaging is still in the early stages:
A combination of inflammation and aging, the term describes a simmering form of inflammation—the immune system’s response to a perceived threat—that is chronic and low-grade, and builds stealthily as you age. It is associated with an increased risk of heart attack, cancer, Alzheimer’s and other conditions.
Inflammaging happens to everyone to some degree as we age, and some people don’t develop much. But scientists say we should pay closer attention. More research is showing the damage it can cause...
High levels of inflammation have been linked to an increased risk of death from any cause—a seven times higher risk compared with those with the lowest levels of inflammation, according to one study examining blood samples from more than 160,000 patients.
Women with high levels of chronic inflammation had a 70% greater risk of a heart attack, stroke or death from a cardiovascular cause than those with low levels, according to a separate study published in August by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who followed the women for 30 years.
A drug has to tamp down inflammation without blocking the immune system. Some patients who have atherosclerosis or are at high risk of cardiovascular disease are treated for inflammation with a low-dose version of the drug colchicine, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2023 for that use. The drug has been used for years to treat gout, a joint-pain disease.The good news for your humble blogger is that metformin (diabetes) and colchicine (gout) have already been prescribed. I'll continue to take them regularly because they may help to reduce chronic inflammation.
Researchers are studying whether other drugs, including GLP-1s, can lower inflammatory markers. And Novo Nordisk and CSL Behring are testing potential anti-inflammatory medications in patients who have cardiovascular disease or are at high risk.
Some people have experimented with taking medications such as metformin and rapamycin to target inflammaging. Both drugs, approved by the FDA for other uses, have shown potential to target inflammaging, but more research in humans is needed.
Otherwise, the best ways to ward off inflammaging today? All the things you should be doing anyway: exercising consistently, not smoking, maintaining a healthy weight and eating healthfully.
Some research suggests the Mediterranean diet, which emphasizes nuts, whole grains, fish, fruits and vegetables, is particularly protective against inflammation. Red meat, by contrast, promotes inflammation.
Most important for brain health is seven to eight hours of sleep a night, said [Mass Gen's Rudolph] Tanzi. The brain gets rid of amyloid that triggers inflammation then, he said.
“Every time you go from dreaming or REM to deep sleep, I call it a rinse cycle.”
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury,pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen
Fifteen years ago if you’d told April Little that she’d make $300,000 a year, she would have pictured a life free of financial stress.The outlays for housing, private schools, transportation, and health care, not to mention education indebtedness, are often underestimated by 20- or 30-year-olds who think they have made it with a $200,000+ starting salary.
“The white picket fence—I have the whole visual in my head,” says Little, 38 years old, a human-resources executive turned career coach in Rochester, N.Y. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but when I got to that proverbial mountaintop I realized there’s a lot of expenses. And I still don’t own a home.”
So go the plush-but-not-too-plush lives of the Americans who qualify as HENRY—high earner, not rich yet.
Little makes multiple six figures running her own business but carries $90,000 of college and grad-school debt. Child care and education for her three children would be so costly that she and her husband decided the better option was for him to leave his radio job to parent and home-school full time.
New census data show 14.4% of U.S. households bring in $200,000 or more a year, a near record. Yet the money doesn’t have the buying power those earners wish it did, partly due to the rising prices hammering us all and partly due to the supercharged costs of things like houses and cars. HENRYs describe feeling stuck on a hamster wheel—a nice one that other hamsters envy—but running in place nonetheless.
Oh come on, you’re thinking. You’re asking me to feel sympathy for Audi-driving, Chase Sapphire-loving, Whole Foods-shopping consultant types with kids in private school?
Well…not exactly. But what they’re feeling is a version of what a lot of Americans at every income level face—making more money but not feeling like there’s a surplus. The essence of being a HENRY is feeling a gap between what you have and what you think you need to be comfortable.
What these high earners consider essentials might be termed luxuries (or nonsense) by the rest of us, but it’s also true that it takes more money to feel rich these days. And their great fear is becoming a HENRE: high earner, not rich ever.
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| (Image from Google Maps) |
In the Tampa Bay metropolitan area, which includes St. Petersburg, a real-estate boom nearly doubled median home values from 2018 to June of this year, according to Redfin data. Young people flocked to the region, looking for a coastal lifestyle at a relatively affordable price.Florida is the No. 2 favored relocation destination for Californians.
The Tampa Bay metro area was the fifth most popular relocation destination in the country, according to an analysis by Redfin last year. The population has soared to more than three million.
But as Shore Acres’s young residents sorted through the storm’s wreckage, only one thing was on their minds: selling.
Hurricane Helene deposited more than 6 feet of storm surge in the Shore
Acres neighborhood of St. Petersburg, Fla. (Photo: Mike Carlson/AP)
Ballooning home insurance costs and the perennial threat of violent storms are starting to undermine housing markets throughout much of the state. But in few places has the turnaround been more dramatic than in low-lying communities up and down the coast of Florida that frequently flood.
The Tampa Bay housing market had been softening even before Helene struck. While prices have been flat, the area experienced a 58% increase in supply in August compared with a year ago, and a 10% decrease in demand, according to Parcl Labs, a real-estate data and analytics firm.
About half the homes listed for sale in Tampa experienced price reductions as of Sept. 9, the third highest share of all U.S. major metropolitan areas.
...The area’s affordability, once a large part of its appeal, is also waning as insurance premiums soar. Jacob McFadden was paying $880 a year to insure his home when he bought it in 2020. That amount has since almost quadrupled, to $3,300.
Premiums will likely increase again now. Property damage from last week’s Category 4 storm could be as high as $26 billion, according to estimates from Moody’s Analytics.
So where did Californians move to in 2023?Generally speaking, California homeowners who move to Florida have cashed out with substantial equity and should be able to invest in flood protection measures, such as raising their homes on columns, piles, and piers. They can also afford to pay for the higher insurance premiums. However, the exodus of lower-income, typically working-class homeowners from Tampa is a troubling sign that Florida may be peaking,
Texas is the top destination for departing Californians, with 13.71% of California moving interest toward the Lone Star State.
Florida is #2 destination for Californians with 7.49% of interest. This confirms other reports that Californians are flocking to The Sunshine State.
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| (For sale on Amazon): But will your cat take care of you? |
Charities, distant relatives and even pets are benefiting from surprise inheritances. They can thank people without children.Having a significant estate when a childless person dies may be the result of rational decision-making:
Not having children is becoming more common, both among millennials and older people. A July Pew Research Center analysis found that 20% of U.S. adults age 50 and older hadn’t had children.
And many of these people don’t have wills. An AARP survey found half of childless people age 50-plus who live alone have a will, compared with 57% of others that age. Those without wills have less control over what happens to their money, which often ends up in the hands of people who don’t expect it.
This phenomenon of a surprise inheritance is common enough that it has a name: the laughing heir.
“All they do is get the money and go, ‘Ah ha ha, look at that,’ ” said Michael Ettinger, an estate lawyer in New York.
Financial advisers say a far bigger concern than who gets what is making sure there is enough money and support for a comfortable old age, because clients without children can’t call on them for help...The old-age safety net, which many still subscribe to, is to have children who will have your best interests at heart. (I've seen enough murder mysteries to know that this is not always the case!)
Choosing an estate executor and who would handle money and health decisions on your behalf can be difficult when you don’t have children, financial advisers say. Using a promised inheritance as a reward for taking care of you when you are older isn’t a good solution, said Jay Zigmont, an investment adviser focused on childless people.
“Unfortunately, it is relatively common to see family members who are in the will decide to opt for cheaper medical care (or similar decisions) in order to protect what they will be inheriting,” he said in an email.
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| Two of the most politically outspoken CEO's: Mark Cuban and Elon Musk (Newsweek/Berezovsky and Catuffe) |
Companies with stridently political CEOs are more likely to engage in corporate misconduct, according to new research. And that’s true regardless of whether the leader leans conservative or liberal.Speech may be free, but talk isn't cheap.
“It boils down to an elevated sense of self-worth and a degree of entitlement,” says Thomas Fewer, an assistant professor of strategic management at Rutgers University and the paper’s lead author.
He says people with strong political convictions tend to have an “us versus them” mentality that discounts the opinions of others, as well as an unwarranted sense of moral superiority. “They grant themselves a moral license,” through which they rationalize bad behavior, he says.
