Lifestyle

My eldest sister called me in a panic. Our middle sister, who lives with Parkinson’s, was struggling to get the in-home care she badly needed. Since we all live thousands of miles apart, I felt helpless. “Did you ask AI,” I asked. “No,” she said. “I’m not getting anywhere near AI. I don’t trust it.” She sounded terrified…

A new habit is usually planned for a best week. An hour of walking, a chapter a day, a tidy routine in a clean notebook. It holds for a few days. Then a bad week arrives. Someone gets sick, an appointment is moved, the weather turns, and the whole thing folds. The notebook goes into a drawer, and the conclusion is that discipline was the problem…

Retirement can be one of life’s great rewards. After decades of working, meeting obligations, and living according to someone else’s schedule, we finally have more freedom to decide how our days will be spent. But there is an important distinction between retiring from a job and retiring from being useful…

Retirement is billed as the time when we finally get to do what we want. No alarm clock. No commute. No calendar filled with meetings we didn’t schedule. After decades of taking care of what needed to be taken care of, we’ve earned some freedom. But there’s an interesting question hiding inside that freedom: Do we know what we want?

There is something bothering me about the conversation we’re having around artificial intelligence. We’re giving the machine too much credit. Sometimes we’re giving it credit for what’s good. Sometimes we’re blaming it for what’s bad. Either way, we’re forgetting about the person sitting in front of it…

For this final article, I wanted to cover two things that might seem unrelated but actually belong together: matters of the heart and matters of the home. Both involve trust. Both involve letting someone new into your life, whether that’s a person or a contractor. And in both cases, AI can help you move forward with a little more confidence and a little less risk…

My brother recently sent me a comic about aging. The first panel shows a very young man, arm in a sling, telling his neighbor that his injury was caused by falling off a house and then getting hit by a car. Panel two is the man, now middle-aged, with the same injury, but this time he is explaining he broke…

There’s a moment on many overseas property viewings when the decision almost makes itself. The agent slides back the balcony doors, and there it is: blue sea, palm trees, perhaps a pool below, a view that bears no resemblance to the one from your kitchen window at home. You can already imagine the morning coffee…

In a moment of panic, I purchased two years of a password manager service. Nothing had actually happened. I had not been hacked. No mysterious person in another country was trying to buy electronics with my credit card. I had listened to a podcast about security breaches and decided that I needed a password manager immediately…

Sometimes there’s that niggling feeling. We can’t quite put our finger on it, but we know something doesn’t sit quite right. It’s not like you’re super unhappy or depressed, but something feels off and you can’t quite work out what. It’s frustrating because, on paper, everything can look okay. Different areas of your life are going okay…