Four For Friday | August 11, 2023
LF71 | Psychological richness, choice-of-future problem, addressing food waste via systems change & understanding HRV
Welcome to a Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week. Enjoy!
Psychological richness - a new kind of happiness
Psychologists have typically categorized happiness into two kinds: hedonic, which is about positive, happy feelings and eudaimonic, which is about long-term fulfilment and purpose. This paper suggests a third type, psychological richness, which comes from unusual experiences such as studying abroad.
How to chose the future
When changing a system from the (sub optimal) current state to a shiny, (presumably) better future, how do you decide what that target future state should be? And who gets to be part of that conversation? This is the ‘choice-of-future’ problem, that requires planners to navigate a range of options with different levels of probability and desirability.
ReFed - holistic approach to food waste
This US non-profit is catalyzing systems change to reduce the amount of food waste (currently 38% of all food is wasted) using data, capital and ‘mobilizing business & people’. Their analysis suggests that “an annual investment of $18 billion could reduce food waste across the food system by more than 58 million tons each year and generate $74 billion in annual net financial benefit.”
Optimizing Longevity: The health metric you’ll want to know
A primer on HRV - what it shows, how to measure and ways in which you can start to improve this key metric of health and longevity.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen