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.

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That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.

- Stephen