The Truman Show. Our family just finished watching The Truman Show. I hadn’t seen it since it originally came out 26 (26?!) years ago, and it was as good as I remembered. It was fun to see how into it our kids were, too. Everything about the film is nearly pitch-perfect, from the casting to the humor (I’m still chuckling about the “It Could Happen To You” poster at the travel agency). The film was so prescient; it’s hard to believe it came out before reality television’s heyday, and its themes about surveillance, voyeurism, turning private lives into entertainment and profit, and the ways viewers are complicit in transforming humans into disposable commodities have only become more salient in the social media age. Add onto that several other existential themes — I think the whole thing can be read as a riff on Plato’s allegory of the cave — and you’ve got quite a compelling flick.
Your therapist wants you to go outside. We’re big advocates for spending time in nature. It’s great not only for your physical health, but your mental health as well, as a meta-analysis by the University of Utah recently confirmed. It found that spending as little as 10 minutes in nature can benefit adults with diagnosed mental illnesses. Water-based outdoor spaces and activities like camping and gardening were especially beneficial. If you haven’t added the 20-5-3 Rule to your health regimen, all the more reason to start now.
Battery Daddy. Last Christmas, my mom got our family what has turned out to be a surprisingly useful gift: The Battery Daddy. It’s a case that stores various sizes of batteries. She even stocked it with batteries for us. It’s solved what had been a perennial problem: I couldn’t find the batteries I needed when I needed them, and when I did find them, they’d sometimes have dislodged from their original packaging and be hanging out in the junk drawer, leading me to wonder if they were new or used. Now, all our batteries reside in one well-organized go-to place. Whenever I see myself getting low in one size of battery, I just fill the Battery Daddy back up.
Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. I bought this book over a decade ago and have turned to it again and again over the years. Poor Charlie’s Almanack is a collection of wisdom and insights from the late Charles T. Munger, a renowned investor and Warren Buffett’s business partner. The book compiles Munger’s speeches, lectures, and commentaries, emphasizing multidisciplinary thinking and practical wisdom for investing and life. His insights about mental models have been particularly useful to me over the years.
Quote of the Week
We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them.
—Seneca
