Hola! I hope you're making the most of these beautiful Summer days. One of my favorite things to do during Summers is making popsicles from freshly squeezed fruit juice. My kids have been getting involved for the first time this Summer and now, they've been requesting homemade popsicles everyday. As we were squeezing orange juice the other day, I asked my 4-year-old to pick up the speed a bit as he was taking his sweet time carefully inspecting each slice of orange, the texture of the peel we were removing, and was in complete awe of it all. I, on the other hand, had a million things running in my mind. Put laundry away, add products to the shop, fill out the rest of the school forms before school starts next week, text my mom, find some time to read a few pages of a lovely book that's collecting dust on my nightstand, and on and on (you know how it goes). So, I asked him to hurry up a bit so we can freeze the popsicles and I can move on to the next task on my list. “But why, mum?” he asked innocently as he continued to be mesmerized by the bright orange peel. There was little I could do other than smile at him, take a deep breath, and remind myself that the entire point of this activity was to be present and enjoy a few wholesome moments with my kids. This interaction left me asking: why are we so obsessed with the idea of efficiency? So, I decided to dig in.
In this week's ‘Notes on Modern Life’, I wrote about why we're always in such a rush and where the concept of doing things more efficiently came from because things weren't always done this way. We didn't always care so deeply about checking everything off our to do list as quickly as possible. I think you'll find this week's read pretty fascinating and I hope it'll leave you with a reminder to slow down every once in a while.
You are, in part, a story you keep telling yourself about who you are. Psychologist Dan McAdams calls this narrative identity, the idea that we don't just accumulate memories, we unconsciously organize them into a plot. A beginning, a turning point, a throughline that explains how the person you were became the person you are today. It's not dishonest, exactly. It's how the mind creates an idea of self from the scattered evidence it has. This means identity is less a fixed record, less like archaeology and more like authorship: the same divorce, the same layoff, the same unremarkable Tuesday can be written as tragedy, as the chapter right before things changed.
McAdams' research found that people who frame difficult chapters as redemptive (as leading somewhere) tend to report greater wellbeing and a stronger sense of purpose than those who frame the same events as hopeless, as the moment something good turned permanently bad. The facts don't change. The narration does. So, I’d encourage you to think about what story you’ve been telling yourself and the world, and is it one you'd choose again, or one you’ve inherited from others.
