It’s an idea whose time has come. Timebanks, having languished in anticipation of the world’s resounding and grateful acknowledgement for too long, may just be the answer to our current spate of financial woes. Through them, we might redefine our understanding of currency to better reflect the value of those goods and services it purports to represent. And if we introduce a new economic model for a population...
“Your face, my Thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters.” So said Lady Macbeth to her nervous husband on the eve of their planned regicide. And while the rest of us may not have king-murdering schemes written across our features, all of our faces are vast repositories of information about the personalities that lurk behind them. Personology is the science of reading faces, wherein a person’s...
Something there is about a list. Its orderly encapsulation of trailing bits of knowledge appeals to our inherent desire to categorize, to contain in neat packages the glut of the world’s information. If we can catalogue it, we can imagine it. To wit, the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People, a compilation recently published by an esoteric British publication called The Watkins Review, applies a sense of...
“In our daily lives,” said celebrated author Arthur Clarke, “we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but the gratefulness that makes us happy.” It’s a lesson the world could stand to learn, given the stark absence of gratitude that characterizes the professional landscape most of us occupy. According to a recent Gallup poll, a full 65% of people say they don’t feel appreciated at work. For the...
The time of year is well upon us now. Holiday parties, in all their reckless, unpredictable glory, spread beneath our feet like poinsettia leaves, loosed from their stems thanks to a stumbling encounter by someone in accounting who’d been too much into the rum punch. Managing their volatile presence inside of an otherwise orderly office environment is a trick, to be sure. No time of the year, after all, issues a...