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ABOUT THE CLUSTER - The shared basis for these articles is the human desire for nostalgia, authenticity, and sustainability. The revival of retro fashion, traditional crafts, and patchwork all cater to a collective yearning for the past, while simultaneously addressing modern concerns about sustainability and individuality. These trends reflect a desire to reconnect with cultural heritage and reintroduce slow fashion practices, blending old-world charm with contemporary values.

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER - The shared basis for these articles is the human desire for nostalgia, authenticity, and sustainability. The revival of retro fashion, traditional crafts, and patchwork all cater to a collective yearning for the past, while simultaneously addressing modern concerns about sustainability and individuality. These trends reflect a desire to reconnect with cultural heritage and reintroduce slow fashion practices, blending old-world charm with contemporary values.

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ABOUT THE CLUTSER - the evolution of art in the digital age continues to adapt and integrate with technology. From live painting and art therapy in the metaverse to AI-generated images and NFTs, these trends illustrate how art is transforming to meet new technological landscapes, personalized experiences, and creative possibilities. The convergence of art and technology has opened up new avenues for expression, healing, and ownership, reflecting a broader shift in how art interacts with society.

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ABOUT THE CLUTSER - the evolution of art in the digital age continues to adapt and integrate with technology. From live painting and art therapy in the metaverse to AI-generated images and NFTs, these trends illustrate how art is transforming to meet new technological landscapes, personalized experiences, and creative possibilities. The convergence of art and technology has opened up new avenues for expression, healing, and ownership, reflecting a broader shift in how art interacts with society.

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Home workouts are rising in popularity due to their convenience and flexibility. Online platforms and virtual classes allow individuals to exercise anytime without going to the gym. This trend saves time and money, reduces barriers to fitness, and offers personalized workout experiences, appealing to many health-conscious individuals.

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Home workouts are rising in popularity due to their convenience and flexibility. Online platforms and virtual classes allow individuals to exercise anytime without going to the gym. This trend saves time and money, reduces barriers to fitness, and offers personalized workout experiences, appealing to many health-conscious individuals.

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Work(out) from home: Pandemic fuels online exercise boom

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While home workouts long predate the coronavirus, they have taken on a social aspect that looks set to become the standard in a world reshaped by the pandemic.

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER - rooted in frugality, focusing on minimizing consumption and embracing cost-effective, sustainable choices  Consumers are increasingly prioritizing value over volume, opting for quality, longevity, and mindful consumption over excess and waste. This collective move towards frugal, thoughtful spending aims to address environmental concerns while also being economically savvy.

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER - rooted in frugality, focusing on minimizing consumption and embracing cost-effective, sustainable choices  Consumers are increasingly prioritizing value over volume, opting for quality, longevity, and mindful consumption over excess and waste. This collective move towards frugal, thoughtful spending aims to address environmental concerns while also being economically savvy.

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Show Me the Money: Feminist Stories on Shifting Power and Resources to Movements

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Show Me the Money: Feminist Stories on Shifting Power and Resources to Movements

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This compelling narrative explores how feminist movements are working to reshape global power dynamics by advocating for the redistribution of resources. It highlights the challenges and triumphs faced by grassroots organizations striving for gender equality, financial autonomy, and social justice. By centering stories from diverse movements, this work emphasizes the importance of direct funding and support to empower feminist causes, ensuring that they lead the charge in creating sustainable change.

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Show me the Money: Feminist Stories on Shifting Power and Resources to Movements

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As we approach the end of the first year of implementing the Feminist Accountability Framework, we offer this updated report with stories from over 110 feminist actors from Asia-Pacific, Latin America…

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About Cluster: Euphoria Experiences signify a cultural shift where consumers prioritize emotional engagement and enjoyment in their choices. As this trend continues to grow, businesses that create immersive experiences—whether through unique dining options or memorable travel adventures—will likely thrive. This focus on pleasure not only enhances individual satisfaction but also fosters deeper social connections among consumers, shaping the future landscape of dining and travel industries.

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About Cluster: Euphoria Experiences signify a cultural shift where consumers prioritize emotional engagement and enjoyment in their choices. As this trend continues to grow, businesses that create immersive experiences—whether through unique dining options or memorable travel adventures—will likely thrive. This focus on pleasure not only enhances individual satisfaction but also fosters deeper social connections among consumers, shaping the future landscape of dining and travel industries.

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ABOUT CLUSTER :The trend of Tech-Infused Personalization encapsulates the seamless integration of advanced technology into innovative design, creating products that are not only functional but also visually appealing. This trend is evident across various industries, from fashion and packaging to consumer electronics and ergonomics.

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ABOUT CLUSTER :The trend of Tech-Infused Personalization encapsulates the seamless integration of advanced technology into innovative design, creating products that are not only functional but also visually appealing. This trend is evident across various industries, from fashion and packaging to consumer electronics and ergonomics.

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About cluster - The common basis across these articles lies in sensorial experiences and how they connect with human behavior and human desire for emotional engagement and personalized stimulation. Each article highlights a trend where sensory experiences whether visual, auditory, or emotional play a significant role in shaping modern culture and individual behavior.

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About cluster - The common basis across these articles lies in sensorial experiences and how they connect with human behavior and human desire for emotional engagement and personalized stimulation. Each article highlights a trend where sensory experiences whether visual, auditory, or emotional play a significant role in shaping modern culture and individual behavior.

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Parisian ready-to-wear fashion brand Coperni openly wears an affinity for emblems of yesterday’s youth. Take for example the label’s CD-PLAYER Swipe Bag revealed late last year, a design referencing that all too brief period when digital innovations had yet to completely define the populace’s still predominately analog lifestyle. Their newest creation – the Coperni x Transparent Speaker Jacket Blasts Nostalgia – turns up the volume of nostalgia to another level.

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Coperni x Transparent Speaker Jacket Blasts a Nostalgic Tune

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Fashion and technology converge in the form of a 70s-inspired leather jacket by Coperni x Transparent that has to be heard to be believed.

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The article highlights Noor, the first Indian live wedding painter, who captures the essence of weddings on canvas in real-time. Noor’s unique talent brings a new dimension to wedding celebrations, blending art with the joy and emotions of the event1

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The article highlights Noor, the first Indian live wedding painter, who captures the essence of weddings on canvas in real-time. Noor’s unique talent brings a new dimension to wedding celebrations, blending art with the joy and emotions of the event1

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1. Innovative Wedding Trends: Noor’s work represents a growing trend of incorporating unique and personalized elements into weddings, making them more memorable.

2. Cultural Fusion: This practice combines traditional art forms with modern wedding celebrations, showcasing a blend of heritage and contemporary creativity.

3. Empowerment through Art: Noor’s success story is an inspiring example of breaking barriers and pursuing unconventional careers, encouraging others to follow their passions.

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In a world where weddings are celebrated with grandeur and extravagance, there's a new trend that's adding a touch of magic to the special day: live wedding painting. While this concept may be novel in India, it's been a beloved tradition in other parts of the world for quite some time. Picture this: a talented artist, armed with brushes and a canvas, capturing the essence of the ceremony in real-time, transforming fleeting moments into timeless works of art.

And at the forefront of this art is none other than Noor, a trailblazer who has defied all odds to become the first Indian live wedding painter. Join us as we delve into Noor's inspiring journey, marked by an unwavering commitment to turning dreams into reality.

Here's Noor's Story In Her Own Words

"I was 17 when I was diagnosed with an auto-immune disease, psoriasis. Since it couldn't be cured, I was advised to control my stress, as it was causing my skin to swell up. The problem was that you can't control stress, and for the diseases, they hear no excuses. So, I had to learn to manage stress along with some lifestyle changes. I was in my I was waiting for my first gig when I learned that an acquaintance was getting married. But who knew? My Ever since then, I have been graduation year when the pandemic happened. I came across a video by Bob Ross. His paintings were so soothing that I could watch them and entire day without blinking an eye. I fell in love with art. The next thing I knew, I was doing oil paintings myself. As time passed, my skills improved. But by then, I had done a terrific job! I got all consumed with work, and my passion took a back seat. I remember sitting in the courtroom and doodling at the back of my file in my free time. I was certainly missingthe opportunity to paint. One day, I came across a video of an American artist who used to do wedding paintings! I whispered to myself, "Mujhe bas yahi kama hai." I started the hustle of coming back from work and painting throughout the night to master this skill. But the real question was how to start it professionally. Weddings are the most special event in one's life, so I took a chance and pitched my idea. They simply loved it and let me paint their beautiful day on my canvas. Everyone was speechless, and I had the biggest smile of satisfaction and achievement on my face. At that moment, I decided that this was what I would do for the rest of my life. I decided to quit my job and follow my heart. I came home and explained my decision to my parents. Mom said, 'Jaldi jaa and quit karde!' struggle had just started. For 2 years, I had no work. To top it all, relatives would mock me. All this would take a toll on my mind and add to my frustration. The stress triggered my disease, and things became really difficult. But then, Mom and Dad always had my back. painting happiness on my canvas. I had my highs and lows, but honestly, looking at the overwhelming reaction of my clients makes me feel like I am on the right track."

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Watch: How Noor Captures Love On Canvas As Live Wedding Painter

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Meet Noor, a trailblazer who has defied all odds to become the first Indian live wedding painter. Join us as we delve into Noor's inspiring journey, marked by an unwavering commitment to turning dreams into reality.

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The Evolution of Packaging: Shaping User Convenience Over Time

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The Evolution of Packaging: Shaping User Convenience Over Time

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Packaging has evolved from simple protective coverings to an integral part of the consumer experience. As user expectations grow, packaging design has shifted towards convenience, sustainability, and functionality. Modern innovations prioritize ease of use, portability, resealability, and environmental impact, ensuring products are not only accessible but also align with changing consumer lifestyles and values. This evolution reflects a deeper understanding of user needs, combining practicality with aesthetics for a seamless, user-friendly experience.

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How did packaging change over the decades to become “The Packaging”? - SISTERS EU Project

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In ancient times, humans used natural materials to package goods, using materials such as animal skins, woven cloth and wooden crates.

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You go straight from CAD to shaping your part; there is no wait for the tooling to be produced.

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New Production Method: Digital Sheet Forming - Core77

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Forming sheet metal is expensive. It requires expensive stamping tools and dies be made, and you need a massive press to load them into. The press takes up a lot of space, as do the tools and dies, which can only make their one shape. Production technology company

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The article discusses ErgonBand’s innovative watch band design, which addresses the issue of watch faces being at the wrong angle during activities like cycling and typing.

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The article discusses ErgonBand’s innovative watch band design, which addresses the issue of watch faces being at the wrong angle during activities like cycling and typing.

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It takes a lot of guts to rethink a form as well-established as the watch band. But Canadian company ErgonBand reckons that plenty of activities, from cycling to running to typing, place our watch faces at the wrong angle to read. Thus they designed the rather elaborate alternative their company is named for:

I would not have guessed this design would succeed, but the company held a successful Kickstarter during the pandemic; four years later, they're still going strong.

The materials choice puzzles me: It's made out of real leather. For their part, the company says you can keep it on while washing your hands, but I imagine the leather would get funky over time. And they say you oughtn't swim with it on.

If this is your thing, they run $220 to $230.

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Rethinking the Ergonomics of the Watch Band - Core77

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It takes a lot of guts to rethink a form as well-established as the watch band. But Canadian company ErgonBand reckons that plenty of activities, from cycling to running to typing, place our watch faces at the wrong angle to read. Thus they designed the rather elaborate alternative their company

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the rising popularity of themed cafés in India, driven by changing customer expectations and the desire for distinctive concepts and immersive experiences

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the rising popularity of themed cafés in India, driven by changing customer expectations and the desire for distinctive concepts and immersive experiences

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Why Themed Cafes And Eateries Are Growing Popular in India? Expert Weighs-In

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Restaurants are capitalizing on this chance to instil the trend of providing consumers with unique and engaging experiences that go beyond traditional dining.

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The article explores the trend of “gig tripping,” where fans travel to different cities or countries to attend concerts, such as Coldplay’s performance in Abu Dhabi1.

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The article explores the trend of “gig tripping,” where fans travel to different cities or countries to attend concerts, such as Coldplay’s performance in Abu Dhabi1.

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Cultural Experience: Enhances cultural exposure and global connectivity.

Tourism Boost: Increases tourism and local economy.

Fan Engagement: Deepens fan engagement and loyalty.

Travel Trends: Reflects evolving travel preferences post-pandemic

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Travelling To Abu Dhabi To See Coldplay? You’re Gig Tripping! Know All About This Travel Trend

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“Gig tripping” typically refers to people travelling specifically to attend concerts or performances of their favourite musicians or bands, Travelogues News - Times Now

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highlights the growing trend of solo travel in 2024, emphasizing its appeal as a form of self-indulgence and autonomy, driven by post-pandemic confidence and the desire for personal freedom.

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highlights the growing trend of solo travel in 2024, emphasizing its appeal as a form of self-indulgence and autonomy, driven by post-pandemic confidence and the desire for personal freedom.

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And one factor fuelling the independent travel trend may be an after-effect of the pandemic's enforced isolation, which "emboldened" people with a 'now or never' attitude", rendering them "more confident than ever about spending time in solitude".

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The number of holidaymakers choosing to go it alone is rising, whether in escorted groups, or independently. And it is an active choice, not forced by an inability to find a travelling companion.

"Rather than a function of necessity or compromise, holidaying alone has become the ultimate indulgence in 2024: a rare chance in this ultra-demanding world to put one's own needs and priorities first," said the London Evening Standard.

"Regardless of life stage or relationship status", many more people are taking solo trips, "not because they have to - but because they want to", said the newspaper.

And one factor fuelling the independent travel trend may be an after-effect of the pandemic's enforced isolation, which "emboldened" people with a 'now or never' attitude", rendering them "more confident than ever about spending time in solitude".

And that solitude can have benefits for our wellbeing. Research by Netta Weinstein, a professor of psychology and clinical language sciences at the University of Reading, has shown that there is a big difference between imposed solitude and chosen solitude, reported The Guardian.

"Having space gives us time to connect with ourselves, and connecting with ourselves benefits our wellbeing," said Weinstein. A key factor appears to be the sense of autonomy we get from being alone. "What we found was that, on any given day when people felt autonomous and competent in solitude, they feel better on that day," she added.

According to an Abta report, 16% of travellers went on holiday by themselves in the year to August 2023, compared to 11% during the previous year, said Travel Weekly. In the 35-44 age group, the proportion of solo travellers more than doubled to 13% in 2023 from just 6% in 2022.

The main attraction of a solo trip is being able to do what you want, when you want. Being on your own is a "chance to really savour the world around you - at your own pace", said Annabelle Thorpe in The Observer. There are "no compromises to be made, no itineraries discussed; get up when you want, eat what you fancy, do nothing or everything, talk to the friendly person next to you at breakfast, or pop in your headphones and ignore them completely".

And this freedom can bring a change in behaviour. "When I'm travelling alone, I become the best version of myself," said Thorpe: "the most decisive, the most charming, the most curious. I see more, go further, strike up conversations with people I'll never meet again, yet always remember."

And it's not just for single people. For those in a relationship, differing work patterns and destination preferences also play a part. "Like many women who travel alone, I have a partner, but his life is a lot less flexible than mine and he doesn't always want the kinds of breaks I do," said Joanna Moorhead in The Guardian.

Research by online travel agent Opodo.com in 2023 revealed that 41% of us prefer to travel alone, reported The Telegraph. "It puts us in control of decision-making", giving us the option "to linger for hours in a museum without our partners or children having a meltdown, or to undertake a lung-busting hike to the top of a mountain to be made small by nature when our close ones prefer the indoors".

And apart from the sightseeing, solo travel "gives us tranquil time for personal reflection and growth".

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Solo travel: the 'ultimate indulgence in 2024'

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The latest The Week Recommends,/the-week-recommends,,the-week-recommends, breaking news, comment, reviews and features from the experts at The Week

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The future of emotional intelligence is evolving to integrate a deeper understanding of human emotions in the context of technology and digital interactions.

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The future of emotional intelligence is evolving to integrate a deeper understanding of human emotions in the context of technology and digital interactions.

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1. Emotional intelligence is crucial for future workplace success ¹.

2. AI can enhance but not replace human emotional skills ¹.

3. Leaders must prioritize emotional intelligence development ¹.

4. Emotional intelligence drives better team collaboration ¹.

5. Future workplaces will value empathy and emotional awareness

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The Future of Emotional Intelligence: A New Wave of Understanding 2024

In support of Training and Development Program: NextGEN IQ 2024

Can Emotional Intelligence even be taught? It's a question I'm often asked and my response is always something like: you're already an expert.

All humans are born with an innate emotional intelligence, for how else would you attach to your mother? Babies begin to read basic emotions (anger, sadness, surprise, fear, joy) starting at six months. We begin to laugh spontaneously at four months and by six months most emotions are felt.

By the time we turn four years of age we develop empathy and can read other's emotional states and by the time we turn fifteen we can read emotional states, if our eyes are good, up to a half mile away.

We are gifted emotional reading and feeling beings.

Well socialization plays a big role in determining (nurture versus nature) in how we read emotions. I joke with students that by the time you graduated high school you went to both Fight Club (learned about anger, negotiation, conflict) and a School of Seduction. Seduction being the strategies you deploy to get something you want but can't simply take from another, so navigating power-equivalency issues.

In addition to family, we have a surrounding culture and state that tells us what's okay and not when it comes to emotions so whatever natural emotional intelligence we have it's often overridden through training and development.

When you live in a community of strangers it's often common you leave people alone regardless of their emotional state; like would you approach a stranger who was in a rage? How about a stranger who was crying or afraid?

In the United States we're taught to mistrust emotions and people feeling emotions and generally proscribe to a point of view that emotions are dangerous and disruptive, which they can be, and that it's best to leave them to the professionals.

And it's in therapy that most people work to get reacquainted with their emotional life.

Any emotional intelligence program is really a rediscovery, getting in touch with your innate talents, practicing unused muscles, learning to open yourself up to your intuitions, having the courage to feel again.

The challenge comes in that emotions themselves can be confusing, we feel anger but we cry, we're scared so we lash out in anger, we're happy but then suddenly angry or fearful.

One of the reasons why we mistrust emotion is because it often seems irrational, the emotion doesn't match the reality, another is because emotions are often a product of what we think is going on not actual reality.

Our beliefs direct our behaviors and our behaviors our actions and the results of that impact our emotional state and for many their negative beliefs and behaviors drive a continued negative state of emotions.

To the point that many would like to bypass (spiritual bypassing) negative emotional states, as exemplified by rankings like this where peace is seemingly a "better" state (it's higher on the graph) than say guilt even though guilt can be a very productive emotion in terms of human growth and development.

Now to be fair Hawkins' chart is simply showing a range of energetic frequencies but the visual message is clear... better to be at Ultimate Consciousness than down suffering.

Seems to be a big market these days for those hawking the "end of suffering" but the focus should be on deepening our understanding of emotions, building our emotional intelligence, increasing our discernment between emotional states we are manufacturing versus emotions being the wonderful guides they are in helping of us meet the challenges of the day.

The following is a set of charts that demonstrate this phenomena of emotional states caused by avoidance or belief systems of even fear that doesn't allow us to be with and process emotions real time and thus they drop into "Secondary" emotions which are once removed from the actual emotion connected to reality.

See if you can spot yourself in this...

Emotional Intelligence: ANGER and SECONDARY SADNESS

Emotions are like dance partners as sadness is often a dancer partner for anger. It's not unusual for clients to cry when angry, usually as a sign that the anger has lost its power to make positive change in a person's life.

There are legit reasons to get angry: when someone oversteps a line with you, when you see injustice or unfairness in the world, when you experience insecurity and neediness within... each are a call to action.

To fix the problem. To confront others. To step up within.

What happens when we turn from our anger and avoid finding a solution and/or stuff it down?

Sadness... in the form of Neggy-Sobby behavior (brat behavior), lost in hopelessness and helplessness, self-pity, feelings or irrelevancy, or "trumpeting like a wounded swan" full of complaint and blame.

The path out is to trace that sadness back to anger, back to the root cause and confront it with courage.

As leaders practicing emotional intelligence we're often called on to confront secondary sadness and help a colleague or direct-report trace that sadness back to anger, then to step into their anger with courage, and last come up with a good plan for confrontation and solution.

Anger is a difficult emotion for many as we are taught to avoid conflict and seek only win-win solutions which can be correct but more often than not anger turns into avoidant and supplicant behaviors for the sake of harmony at the cost of our integrity.

How well do you do with anger?

How well do you do with another's anger?

Is there a kind of anger you shy from? Like women's anger, people in authority, men's anger, children's anger?

How well do you do in recognizing secondary sadness? Sadness that isn't driven by loss but anger?

Can you begin to imagine growing your emotional intelligence to the point that you could help someone navigate their secondary sadness back to anger towards confrontation and a solution?

Can you do that for yourself?

When was the last time you felt hopeless, helpless, self-pity, or wounded?

Can you trace it back to anger? Back to root cause?

What might have been a better way to deal with the situation looking back?

Isn't anger often wonderful as it speaks to our values?

Can you see the positive side of anger?

Emotional Intelligence: SADNESS and SECONDARY ANGER

It's okay to feel sad. To cry. I often ask men when was the last time they cried and the answers vary: some within the past week, some months, some years, and a few not since they were boys.

Men are deeply emotional. You ever watch/play a high stakes game (video, sports, gambling) with men and feel the emotional intensity? Anger is permissible, joy, even fear to some extent but sadness is the one emotion that men aren't allowed to feel. It's considered weak, soft, "gay," or some other derogatory term and yet life can be crushingly sad.

You think about the losses we can experience from the loss of a parent or child, to divorce, to losing a job, to physical and mental setbacks to even how you feel when your team loses a big game... it's all legit. Not to mention the sadness we feel when hit with shame (rejection, abandonment, betrayal, humiliation) which can be overwhelming.

Why do men struggle with sadness and women with anger?

In part because of the genderization of the emotions themselves (anger is masculine, crying is feminine) but also because they're both so powerful in the body. When you're in a full rage you can feel possessed, out of control, powerful and that can make women uncomfortable and when you're in the deepest of sadness it can bring you to your knees, curl up in bed, racked with sadness, vulnerable but even more than that tears come out, they are visible, men live in terror of being shamed at the sight of tears.

Men will swallow sadness to the point that tears forget how to work.

It's not till they're older, in their fifties and sixties when the testosterone has mellowed enough that they start crying unexpectedly at the National Anthem or some beer commercial.

When I work with men and sadness I try to normalize sadness, take it away from shame, degenderize it, and let them know that small steps, baby steps, is okay... it's enough sometimes just to know you're feeling sad without the proof of tears.

For men and women when they don't feel sadness they'll flip into secondary anger and that's not a good place to be emotionally as it is full of feelings of revenge, cruelty and sadism, craving and addiction, the desire to armor up and be untouchable to feelings of contempt which is shame turned outward.

Secondary anger is an ask to be hurt, hurt so bad you'll finally give yourself permission to feel sad. The way to disrupt this is to feel the sadness at the start before it drops into shenpa and secondary anger.

I have a client who "practices sadness" by watching sad movies like "The Green Mile" and "Brian's Song" and "Saving Private Ryan" "Shawshank Redemption" as that helps remind him what sadness looks and feels like.

Women sometimes aren't allowed to be sad as it scares the men and children around them, scares their coworkers and friends, and so they too learn to stuff it down until in turns into secondary anger.

I've met more than a few women armored up and seeking revenge.

For women it seems more about finding a good friend, someone who is willing to really listen and bear sacred witness to their story and hold space for their feelings so they can let it out.

Sometimes you have to work through a lot of secondary anger to get to the sadness.

It's important to remember for both men and women that you can't have sadness without love first.

"Grief and praise are one and the same thing. Grief is a praise of life. You will not feel the loss of anything unless you are absolutely in love with it. Grief is not about when you don't get what you want. Grief is when you lose what you love. And that's two different things. And so praise is way to give life to things for having been given the love to feel the loss." Martín Prechtel

First there is love, then there is loss.

How well do you do with sadness?

How well do you do with another's sadness?

Is there a kind of sadness you shy from? Like a woman's sadness, people who are dependent upon you, men's sadness, children's sadness?

How well do you do in recognizing secondary anger? Anger that is driven by the supression of sadness?

Can you begin to imagine growing your emotional intelligence to the point that you could help someone navigate their secondary anger back towards sadness and grief?

Can you do that for yourself?

When was the last time you felt the desire for revenge, sadism, craving, contempt or the desire to protect yourself from getting hurt?

Can you trace it back to sadness? Back to root cause?

What might have been a better way to deal with the situation looking back?

Isn't sadness often wonderful as it speaks to our deepest love?

Can you see the positive side of sadness?

Emotional Intelligence: FEAR and SECONDARY HAPPINESS

It has been said we are on a little blue ball traveling around the sun at 10,000 miles an hour that itself rests in a universe traveling at an astounding 1.3 million miles per hour out from the center of the Big Bang. Where we are today is far away in time and space from where we were yesterday.

Buddhist teachers will state that any normality or stability you see and feel is an illusion as there is only change and resistance to change; the world is on FIRE and the poet David Whyte talks about how we must tap into our fiery mutable nature to find the courage to face change.

We know from the somatic therapists that we have a complex nervous system that regulates our emotions, especially fear, from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic and that in our most extreme state of fear we will freeze.

Fear can lock our body and shake our very foundation. Extreme fear is a very uncomfortable feeling and yet some seek fear out in healthy ways like rollercoasters, haunted houses, and extreme sports and in unhealthy ways like crime, drugs, and dangerous sex.

Fear is unique... what scares you doesn't bother another and vice versa. I dated a nurse a few years back and she said that everyone who works in the medical field has something they're afraid of and for her it was eyeballs. Eyeballs creeped her out. I joked with her that visual and tactile I can deal with most things but smells oh I hate certain smells. I will leave a concert to poo at home versus dealing with a port-a-potty.

There are core fears we all share: being abandoned, being rejected and alone, the threat of physical and emotional harm, poverty, and many of us have a fear of success.

When you don't process your fear, turn your back on it or run from it, it tends to slide into the secondary emotion of "Pretend Happiness" which can look like people pleasing, chasing luxury, obsessed with appearances, being fake and phony, and deeper still a lack of real purpose or vision.

Having a purpose and vision in life creates hardship and complications but it does seem to tap into real happiness.

Fear bottomline is a call for information.

How well do you do with fear?

How well do you do with another's fear?

Is there a kind of fear from others that you shy from? Like a woman's fear, people who are dependent upon you, men's fear, children's fear?

How well do you do in recognizing secondary pretend happiness? Happiness that is driven by the suppression of fear?

Can you begin to imagine growing your emotional intelligence to the point that you could help someone navigate their secondary happiness back towards fear?

Can you do that for yourself?

When was the last time you felt you were people pleasing, or chasing luxury, or being fake?

Can you trace it back to fear? Back to root cause?

What might have been a better way to deal with the situation looking back?

Isn't fear often wonderful as it speaks to our desire for wellbeing?

Can you see the positive side of fear?

Emotional Intelligence: HAPPINESS and SECONDARY FEAR

Dr. Martin Seligman gave the world a gift with his study of happiness; what had been kept in the dark with psychologists focused mostly on abnormal psychology was now illuminated in his brilliant work. What makes us happy was no longer a secret and although somewhat self explanatory it was good to have the data to back it up.

Flow - long stretches of focus on a task that requires our excellence to the point where time, minor aches and pains, the concerns of the day disappear. This isn't meditation. This isn't presence. This is being in the flow, in the zone, in the groove.

Building towards a future... in your relationships, in your community, a sense of wellbeing from contribution and sacrifice to a greater good. However that is defined for you.

Pleasure - the ability to soak in pleasure, the sensual eros of life... to be in your body and feel its delights.

His work of course has been corporatized into the PERMA model, safe now for consumer consumption, but the soul of his work is still there if you look closely.

Happiness is the clearest sign we have that we're on the right track. When we feel good in our body and mind, when we are full of positive emotions, positive relationships, authenticity and integrity with our core being, when we have meaning in our life and accomplishment we know we're successful.

When we're not okay with happiness (and that might seem counterintuitive but many people are uncomfortable with being happy) we tend to drop down into Secondary Fear... a fear that feels totally out of control.

We're sold out or are burnt out. In unhealthy codependent relationships and we're in an unhealthy practice of suppressing our deepest of desires, edgy, taking things personally and have lost touch with our values, vision and mission...

The way out of that kind of fear is to start back at the beginning with the lowest levels of Maslow's Hierarchy and focus on personal safety and work your way up.

How well do you do with happiness?

How well do you do with other people's joy and happiness? Do you experience competition and envy?

Is there a kind of joy you shy from?

How well do you do in recognizing secondary fear? A fear that is driven by the potential loss of happiness?

Can you begin to imagine growing your emotional intelligence to the point that you could help someone navigate their secondary fear back to happiness and joy?

Can you do that for yourself?

When was the last time you felt burnt out, like a sell out, taking things personally, or unsure of what you're doing and why you're even here on earth?

Can you trace it back to happiness? Back to root cause?

What might have been a better way to deal with the situation looking back?

Isn't happiness often wonderful as it speaks to the pleasures of being alive.

Can you see the positive side of happiness?

Emotional Intelligence: SURPRISE

It seems to me that the postmodern guru is concerned with power and control. It's like they want all the powers of a Jedi and none of the vulnerability. To be perfect. The best life, the best food, the best partner, the best... driven I think by both fear and greed.

What I notice is a defense against the unexpected.

A guardedness against the vagaries of life.

Or a world weariness and jadedness that nothing in life can surprise them as they've seen it and done it all.

Personally they seem a bit emotionally dead to me, lost to the larger patterns of the world, the warp and weft that shapes our days and creates our destiny and fate.

They miss the tiny miracles of everyday life that surrounds them.

Simple things like how cool are dogs.

Sudden windfalls are taken as IOUs, when a stranger pays them a complement they look for ulterior motives, when the feel positive joy for no reason they count the minutes until its departure.

It's tough to live in a world without unexpected adventure and novelty, to believe you have it all figured out.

Disgust is the twin flame of delight.

That unexpected revulsion we experience when we encounter something we detest like dog poo on the bottom of our shoe or a spider crawling across the bathroom floor or an inappropriate sexual joke or someone, say a politician running for POTUS with a seriously flawed moral compass, that continues to make disgusting statements.

Surprise keeps us on our toes.

Engaged with the world in both its forms of delight and disgust.

How well do you do with delight?

How well do you do with disgust?

Do you find more delight in the world or more disgust?

Can you see the shadow of delight? A pollyannaish take on life...

Can you see the shadow of disgust? Unwilling to take risk and try new things...

When was the last time you felt delight? When was the last time you felt disgust

Emotional Intelligence: SHAME

Shame is a powerful emotion.

On many scales of emotion it is described as the lowest vibration we can feel. To feel shame is a kind of soul suicide as there is nothing that can be done to fix it.

Shame isn't the same as guilt, it isn't words or deeds that can be repaired or apologized for, no shame is you. You are the problem and there's not much that can be done about that unless you choose to remove yourself from life.

And that is the feeling of shame, that desire to crawl so far deep into a hole nobody can find you.

Shame turned inward is Self Loathing which produces a whole slew of Secondary Emotions and Behaviors like... a lack of self confidence, comparative constructs, a focus on the negative, being overly self critical, and the quest for perfectionism.

Shame turned outwards is Contempt.

Which also has bevy of interesting Secondary Emotions and Behaviors like eye rolling and sneering, being dismissive or belittling, the "I'm only joking" kind of defensive action when someone is called out on their contempt, to endless blame, ridicule, and criticism... to stonewalling.

Stonewalling is maybe the most contempt driven behavior you can display towards another as you literally wipe them off the face of the earth by ignoring them, denying them, avoiding them.

Stonewalling is making someone disappear and when you compare it to David Richo's "The Five A's" you can literally see they are the 180º and the antidote to Contempt.

You can also see how the Five A's allow for the path of forgiveness and are an antidote to self-loathing as well.

Is there anybody in your life right now that you have contempt for?

Can you trace it back to shame? A feeling of rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal?

On a scale of 0-10 with zero being thriving in self love and ten being full on self loathing where are you right now?

Can you trace it back to shame? A feeling of rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal?

How well do you do with the Five A's towards yourself and others?

Can you see how by introducing a practice of the Five A's you can begin to change shame?

So that's a lot to process I know but as you start to pick up on this model you'll find yourself more able to deal with your own emotions and those of others and really get back to good vibrations.

Emotions are temporary states design to help us navigate a complex world.

They help us make better decisions and bring joy to life, given it meaning, provide context and release.

Everyone feels better when they're allowed to release their emotions and be present in the moment to real time reality.

The better we get at feeling emotions in real time the more present we will be to the moment and more available to remain curious and engaged.

I know some who nurse emotions like fine wines, they have an entire "basement" filled with bottled emotions they've been saving for years... time to let that go and do the emotional work to bring you back to the present moment.

When we can stop our dropping into secondary emotions but stay with the uncomfortable original emotion it allows us more freedom to take the proper and correct action we want to engage and create the outcomes we want for our lives.

As a client recently said after years of work on emotions,

"If we don't feel ALL of the emotions with any activity we're doing, then why are we doing them?

If there's no sadness, there's no desire for growth.

If there's no anger, there's no passion for what you're doing.

If there's no fear, you're probably not risking enough for true change and growth.

If there's no joy, it's probably not an activity for you..

If there's no surprise, you're probably not exploring the potential of what you're engaged in."

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The Future of Emotional Intelligence: A New Wave of Understanding 2024

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The Future of Emotional Intelligence: A New Wave of Understanding 2024 by Matthew Larsen Morava In support of Training and Development Program: NextGEN IQ 2024 ..

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Cringe culture refers to a social phenomenon where certain behaviors, interests, or expressions are deemed awkward, embarrassing, or overly enthusiastic, leading to mockery or discomfort.

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Cringe culture refers to a social phenomenon where certain behaviors, interests, or expressions are deemed awkward, embarrassing, or overly enthusiastic, leading to mockery or discomfort.

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It typically involves making fun of people for enjoying things considered "cringeworthy," such as fandoms, certain fashion trends, or social media behavior. Cringe culture has gained prominence in online communities, often discouraging genuine self-expression out of fear of being ridiculed.

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Why is everyone suddenly so embarrassed for everyone else?

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Vintage Vibes: Retro Fashion Trends Making a Bold Comeback in 2024

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Vintage Vibes: Retro Fashion Trends Making a Bold Comeback in 2024

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Retro fashion is taking center stage again in 2024, with styles from the '50s, '60s, and '70s re-emerging on runways across the world. Bouffant hairstyles, frosted blue eyeshadow, and doll-like lashes evoke a sense of nostalgia, while modern twists on '70s mullets and choppy bangs are breathing new life into these timeless looks. Iconic elements like bold red nails, structured vintage silhouettes, and glamorous hair are transforming how we blend history with contemporary flair​.

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“VINTAGE VIBES - RETRO FASHION TRENDS MAKING A COMEBACK”: DE MODE GLOBAL

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Vintage fashion has a timeless allure that continually reinvents itself, capturing the essence of bygone eras while blending seamlessly with

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Platforms like Substack and Patreon allow users to crowdsource news and support independent journalists. These platforms are gaining traction as alternatives to traditional news media, creating a new ecosystem where audiences fund the content they want to see.

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Platforms like Substack and Patreon allow users to crowdsource news and support independent journalists. These platforms are gaining traction as alternatives to traditional news media, creating a new ecosystem where audiences fund the content they want to see.

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Crowdsourcing is the best weapon in fight against fake news

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Laypeople are much better than many would have expected at knowing which outlets to trust.

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Remote work tensions escalate as leaders and employees struggle to agree, requiring balanced approaches and open discussions to address productivity and flexibility concerns

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Remote work tensions escalate as leaders and employees struggle to agree, requiring balanced approaches and open discussions to address productivity and flexibility concerns

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1. Polarization: Conflicting views on remote work are escalating ¹.

2. Power Balance: Neither side holds all the power in the debate ¹.

3. Resolution Difficulty: Finding mutually beneficial solutions is challenging ¹.

4. Leadership Role: Leaders must collaborate with employees for balance ¹.

5. Significant Change: Remote work is a major shift since the industrial revolution ¹.

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While conflicting perspectives on remote work are not new, the tension seems to be escalating. Neither side holds all the power, and as the conversation becomes more and more polarized, it becomes more difficult to reach a mutually beneficial resolution. Leaders must actively collaborate with their employees to find a balanced approach to one of the most significant changes to the way we work since the industrial revolution. First, the author discusses why it's so hard for leaders and employees to agree on remote work, then uses that knowledge to inform a few steps for leaders to help facilitate a frank and open discussion with employees - one that recognizes and validates the needs and concerns of both sides.

You don't have to look hard to find someone arguing passionately about the benefits or perils of remote work. Some people argue that leaders' productivity concerns are unfounded, while high-profile executives like Elon Musk suggest that anyone working from home is "phoning it in." The issue, variably framed in terms of returning to the office (RTO), hybridity, or flexibility, is no doubt polarizing. But the one consistent element of the arguments for and against is how strong and entrenched the stances are.

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While conflicting perspectives on remote work are not new, the tension seems to be escalating. Neither side holds all the power, and as the conversation becomes more and more polarized, it becomes more difficult to reach a mutually beneficial resolution.

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The Balletcore Movement: Fashion's Newest Soft and Feminine Aesthetic

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The Balletcore Movement: Fashion's Newest Soft and Feminine Aesthetic

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Balletcore, a 2024 fashion trend, draws inspiration from ballet costumes with its focus on delicate pastel tones, soft fabrics, and graceful silhouettes. This style emphasizes subtlety and femininity, featuring shades of pink, white, and cream in both matte and shimmery finishes. Balletcore outfits often include flowing skirts, satin textures, and dainty accessories, offering a romantic yet minimalistic look that enhances natural beauty. The trend blends functionality with elegance, making it a versatile choice for everyday wear

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With the “balletcore” hashtag trending on TikTok and Gen Z reinterpreting the aesthetic, ballet fashion is being reclaimed for a new generation.

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Threads: Unraveling the Social Fabric of Meta's Latest Innovation

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Threads: Unraveling the Social Fabric of Meta's Latest Innovation

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Threads, Meta’s latest social app, promises to reshape online interaction by emphasizing text-based conversations in a visually engaging environment. Designed as an alternative to traditional social platforms, Threads encourages users to share thoughts, ideas, and stories while fostering authentic connections. With features that blend Instagram's visual appeal and Twitter's conversational essence, Threads aims to create a vibrant community focused on dialogue and creativity, making it a compelling addition to the social media landscape. Discover the app's innovative features and the vision behind its development, as Meta strives to redefine how we connect and communicate in the digital age.

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Threads: The inside story of Meta’s newest social app

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Earlier this year, a small team of engineers at Meta started working on an idea for a new app. It would have all the features people expect from a text-based conversations app, but with one very ke…

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Health Care at Home Initiative: Advancing Health Equity for All

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Health Care at Home Initiative: Advancing Health Equity for All

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The Health Care at Home Initiative aims to improve access to quality healthcare services for underserved communities by providing medical care, monitoring, and support directly in patients' homes. This program focuses on addressing health disparities by removing barriers such as transportation, cost, and limited healthcare access, ensuring equitable treatment for all, regardless of their socioeconomic status or geographic location. Through personalized care and cutting-edge technology, the initiative promotes holistic well-being and fosters healthier, more inclusive communities.

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Center for Devices and Radiological Health

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FDA Launches Health Care at Home Initiative to Advance Health Equity

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The CDRH Health Care at Home initiative aims to better position agency to address health care needs by moving care into the home setting.

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER - a human desire for authentic connection, personalization, and community in the virtual world. They showcase how technology is facilitating new forms of relationships, with a focus on creating meaningful engagement and accessibility for diverse communities in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape. 

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER - a human desire for authentic connection, personalization, and community in the virtual world. They showcase how technology is facilitating new forms of relationships, with a focus on creating meaningful engagement and accessibility for diverse communities in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape. 

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The Power of Simplicity: Why a 'Less is More' Skincare Routine is Key to Healthier Skin

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The Power of Simplicity: Why a 'Less is More' Skincare Routine is Key to Healthier Skin

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The "skin streaming" trend is gaining momentum, emphasizing minimalism in skincare routines. By reducing the number of products and focusing on multi-functional, gentle ingredients, this approach not only saves time but prevents over-exfoliation and irritation caused by competing active ingredients. This pared-down regimen supports the skin's natural barrier, fostering balance, hydration, and a radiant complexion. The shift towards simplicity highlights that healthy, glowing skin doesn't require a complicated 10-step process, just the right essentials​.

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Why A Less-Is-More Skincare Routine Is The Real Secret To Healthier Skin

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What happened after one Vogue editor gave up moisturiser.

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users become more conscious of their digital health, platforms are integrating features like usage tracking, reminders to take breaks, and “focus modes” that disable notifications. This trend is especially appealing to Gen Z, who is vocal about mental health issues related to social media

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users become more conscious of their digital health, platforms are integrating features like usage tracking, reminders to take breaks, and “focus modes” that disable notifications. This trend is especially appealing to Gen Z, who is vocal about mental health issues related to social media

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In an increasingly digital world, we find ourselves incessantly checking our phones. If you ARE feeling this way, maybe you should rethink your digital habits if they don't seem to be benefiting your mental health.

In an increasingly digital world, we find ourselves incessantly checking our phones: Instagram likes, Facebook messages, Spotify, emails, text messages, voice messages, podcasts and apps constantly pinging, begging for our constant attention and luring us into the temptations of scrolling and clicking. How many of us have been caught up watching Instagram stories or scrolling Facebook posts for hours, mindlessly clicking through until you jar yourself awake and you can't remember the digital route that you took to wind up where you are? Not only that, but how do you FEEL after you finish a solid scroll sesh? Guilty? Jealous? Sad? You're definitely not alone - so many of us get caught up in social media webs and wind up feeling awful after spending hours on the phone. If you ARE feeling this way, maybe you should rethink your digital habits if they don't seem to be benefiting your mental health.

I'm going to throw some scary statistics at you: studies show that Americans check their phones between 80 and 300 times per day, with the average adult spending more than 11 hours per day watching, listening, reading or interacting with media (TV, smartphones, tablets, laptop usage) and 26% of Americans are constantly online! This is, of course, gathered from market research so it could be more or less if you were to launch a global study of developed nations.

What does that mean though? Well, my interpretation would be that we are losing actual face-to-face interaction with our friends and family due to our preoccupation with the digital world, adversely affecting our mental health. Many people are suffering from depression, anxiety and eating disorders that are fuelled by the idealised photos, videos and posts found on their social feeds. What we all need to remember is that posts online are not necessarily an accurate reflection of reality. The majority of people post a glamourised version of reality; how they want to be seen in the world and how they want to portray themselves. Remembering that what you see online is not necessarily reality can lead to some profound realisations about both yourself and who you follow.

Constant comparison to others leads to limited creativity and inspiration; breeds irritability, anger, jealousy and feelings of inadequacy. If this is how you are feeling, it's time to break the scroll cycle and adapt a new approach to social media usage.

Acknowledge, Analyse and Reflect

Maybe you don't know why you feel the way that you do when you are online. Take the time to acknowledge how you are feeling whenever you have a negative online experience, analyse why this triggered specific feelings of negativity, and reflect on what you can do to change the experience. Once you have identified the why and how, implement it! Possibly that means you need to do a cull of friends or people you are following, mute stories or posts, or even block, if necessary.

Hit the Unfollow Button

Does someone constantly pop up on your screen that immediately makes you feel awful, self-conscious and upset? Unfollow. Take control of your feed/feeds and tailor them to reflect exactly who and what you want to see when you open your social media. Worried about offending a friend or acquaintance you were roped into connecting with on socials? Facebook and Instagram have released a great feature where you can mute people's posts and stories so they will never appear unless you manually search for them.

Limit Your Screen Time

I know, I know, this sounds daunting, AND difficult! Many of us have jobs that require us to spend hours and hours behind a computer, as well as commute to work. Ironically, "social" media can lead us to feeling more lonely and isolated. Decreasing screen time in your off hours has proven benefits, such as feeling less depressed and anxious. Use your time to connect with friends and family, exercise, read, meditate, cook, paint, write or practice yoga. There are plenty of activities that require no screen time, and these are just a few. Find the best ones for you and give them a regular slot in your weekly schedule! When I can be off my phone, I put it on 'Do Not Disturb', and I like to spend my time choreographing dance routines, reading books and spending time at the beach. I also allocate a block of time daily, in the evenings, to be present with my husband, so I'm sorry if I take a bit of time to get back to your comments! Boundaries are so important to enforce on yourself, and will only benefit your mental health at the end of the day. Temptation will be strong, but like anything, the urge to be constantly connected and glued to your phone will wane.

If the thought of trying to decrease screen time is too overwhelming, there are also apps that can help you set limits to your daily screen time, that notify you or force you off if you try to extend the time allowed.

Turn Off Notifications

Turning off notifications or turning your phone on Do Not Disturb can be a great way to disconnect from your social media for awhile. Instead of seeing tons of notifications of things happening online, you can rest easy not knowing for a while - and when you do go on to check, you'll have the reward of a buildup of notifications to look through instead of just one or two at a time.

Using Social Media for Good

Now guys, I don't want you to only take the negatives away from this blog post. Obviously, the majority of my job is utilising social media and the internet so I don't want to beat it down too much. Social media has allowed me to create authentic, fun content, connect with YOU and build a community of like-minded people who want to celebrate each other's success. This is exactly why I created the upBEat tribe - a rapidly-growing group of amazing humans, who build each other up and cheer each other on every day.

Social media is an important tool for businesses, brands and individuals. When used mindfully, social media allows you to connect with brands you love and allows those brands to become a multi-dimensional entity now as well - showing you their founders, employees, likes, dislikes and opens the communication channels in an unprecedented way. Social networking platforms allow you the tools to connect with people locally and internationally, that you may have never crossed paths with otherwise. The access to the free flow of both written and visual content is astounding - as well as the ability to interact with that media.

Social media can make you feel less alone and more connected, but with the right niche groups and a supportive, nurturing online environment, you can thrive and build genuine, meaningful connections.

Create a Better Digital Experience

So I've hit you with a lot of information here, and it can be a lot to break down. If you think that you want to change your digital habits, but are reluctant - start with small changes. For example, using 'Do Not Disturb' mode incrementally, make sure your phone is switched to night mode at night (soft orange light instead of harsh blue light), begin tracking and limiting your online time and identifying what makes you feel bad when you scroll. More and more you will be able to tailor your online experience to exactly what you want to see and you will begin to see and feel the benefits.

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Digital Wellbeing | Checking In With Your Social Media Habits - Up To The Beat

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In an increasingly digital world, we find ourselves incessantly checking our phones. If you ARE feeling this way, maybe you should rethink your digital habits if they don't seem to be benefiting your mental health.

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Turning waste fabrics into bricks is an innovative way to reduce textile waste and promote sustainable construction. These eco-friendly, durable bricks are gaining popularity as industries seek greener alternatives. By repurposing fabric scraps, this method supports a circular economy and addresses both fashion and construction waste challenges, making it highly relevant in today's sustainability-focused world.

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Turning waste fabrics into bricks is an innovative way to reduce textile waste and promote sustainable construction. These eco-friendly, durable bricks are gaining popularity as industries seek greener alternatives. By repurposing fabric scraps, this method supports a circular economy and addresses both fashion and construction waste challenges, making it highly relevant in today's sustainability-focused world.

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FabBRICK is transforming textile waste into eco-friendly bricks

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The world is changing, and so is the way we build things. Traditional construction materials have been causing environmental and resource problems, but now there are new, exciting alternatives on t…

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An economics graduate from Patna, unable to find a job for two years, started a tea stall, becoming an inspiring entrepreneur known as “Chaiwali.”

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An economics graduate from Patna, unable to find a job for two years, started a tea stall, becoming an inspiring entrepreneur known as “Chaiwali.”

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`This 24-year-old girl from Patna has started her own tea stall outside her college after failing to clear the competitive exams of the bank. She studied hard for these exams, but guess luck was not in her favour.

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ETimes is an Entertainment, TV & Lifestyle industrys promotional website and carries advertorials and native advertising.

Copyright © 2024 Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All rights reserved. For reprint rights: Times Syndication Service

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This economics graduate turns Chaiwali after being unable to find a job for 2 years

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Unemployment can break a person's core and when it's an educated person looking for a job, then it shatters the dream from the heart. But, have you ever heard that unemployment gave a person the wings to fly? Well, this is what recently happened with Priyanka Gupta, who is an economics graduate from Patna Women's College in Bihar.

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Artful Braids: Elevating Hair to a Creative Masterpiece

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Artful Braids: Elevating Hair to a Creative Masterpiece

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In 2024, braids have transcended their traditional form, evolving into intricate, artful creations on the runway. Designers like Schiaparelli and Thom Browne have reinvented this classic hairstyle with whimsical twists—braids styled as neckties or arranged into gravity-defying loops.

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From Neon Braids to Natural Hair Sculptures, These 5 Women are Living Works of Art​

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On the streets and all over social media, these dauntless women are introducing some of the most provocative hairstyles to pop culture.

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A tiny home designed for two people, emphasizing its compact, comfortable, and functional features. It highlights innovative space-saving solutions and modern aesthetics, making it ideal for minimalist living.

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A tiny home designed for two people, emphasizing its compact, comfortable, and functional features. It highlights innovative space-saving solutions and modern aesthetics, making it ideal for minimalist living.

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Yanko Design - Modern Industrial Design News

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Designed by Rocky Mountain Tiny Homes, the Bandelier tiny home features a decent length of 28 feet. The home is quite cleverly created, and is equipped with a comfy interior for two people, plus some guests. The home has a well-proportioned and designed living area, as well as a bathtub. The Bandelier is a bit different compared to the other builds by Rocky Mountain Tiny Houses, and this is because the shell and exterior were already constructed. The firm only made a few small changes, and finished the interior.

Designer: Rocky Mountain Tiny Homes

You can access the interior via the front door, and it leads you to the living room which is equipped with shelving, a sofa bed for guests, as well as a compact wood-burning stove. This section then leads to the kitchen which is pretty well-sized for a tiny home. It is furnished with quartz counters, seating area, an oven, and a propane-powered stove. It also includes a microwave, full-size fridge/freezer, and sink.

The kitchen and bathroom are connected via a sliding door. The bathroom includes a vanity sink, flushing toilet, as well as a full-size bathtub/shower, which isnt really found in tiny homes. There is some storage space as well. However, the Bandelier only contains a single bedroom, which can be accessed via a storage-integrated staircase. The bedroom is a typical tiny house-style loft with a low ceiling, as well as a double bed, storage, and some generous glazing.

The Bandelier tiny home was constructed for wildland firefighters, and it is located near the Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. We are unsure of the price but homes by Rocky Mountain Tiny Houses usually cost around US$100,000 when built from scratch.

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This Cleverly-Designed Tiny Home For Two Is Compact, Comfortable & Functional - Yanko Design

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Designed by Rocky Mountain Tiny Homes, the Bandelier tiny home features a decent length of 28 feet. The home is quite cleverly created, and is equipped with a comfy interior for two people, plus some guests. The home has a well-proportioned and designed living area, as well as a bathtub.

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Social commerce via livestreaming is gaining popularity for combining real-time engagement with shopping, creating an interactive experience. This trend is relevant as consumers seek authentic connections with brands. As people recognize the convenience and entertainment of online shopping, livestreaming provides a dynamic platform for product discovery and community building in a digital marketplace.

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Social commerce via livestreaming is gaining popularity for combining real-time engagement with shopping, creating an interactive experience. This trend is relevant as consumers seek authentic connections with brands. As people recognize the convenience and entertainment of online shopping, livestreaming provides a dynamic platform for product discovery and community building in a digital marketplace.

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Social Commerce & Livestream Shopping For Small Businesses

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Discover the game-changing impact of social commerce and livestream shopping on small businesses. Uncover how it can transform e-commerce.

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The headline “The Dangerous Evolution of Cancel Culture” discusses the growing and increasingly aggressive tactics used in cancel culture, particularly within academic settings12. This article highlights how cancel culture has evolved from social media boycotts to more direct actions, such as privately messaging students to discourage them from enrolling in certain courses12. This trend poses significant threats to free speech, open inquiry, and academic freedom.

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The headline “The Dangerous Evolution of Cancel Culture” discusses the growing and increasingly aggressive tactics used in cancel culture, particularly within academic settings12. This article highlights how cancel culture has evolved from social media boycotts to more direct actions, such as privately messaging students to discourage them from enrolling in certain courses12. This trend poses significant threats to free speech, open inquiry, and academic freedom.

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1. Escalation of Tactics: Cancel culture has moved beyond public shaming on social media to more personal and direct methods, increasing the pressure on individuals ¹ ².

2. Impact on Education: The targeting of faculty and students disrupts the educational environment, stifling diverse viewpoints and open discussion ¹ ².

3. Broader Societal Implications: This evolution reflects a broader societal shift towards intolerance of differing opinions, which can undermine democratic principles and civil discourse ¹ ².

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America’s Regional Variations Are Wildly Overstated

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The Dangerous Evolution of Cancel Culture | Newgeography.com

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The Superfood Obsession: Fueling Health Trends and Modern Diets

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The Superfood Obsession: Fueling Health Trends and Modern Diets

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Superfoods, hailed for their dense nutrient profiles and health-boosting properties, have taken the wellness world by storm. From chia seeds to kale, these nutrient-rich powerhouses promise enhanced vitality, weight management, and disease prevention. While the obsession with superfoods continues to grow, experts debate the true impact of these foods and encourage a balanced approach, integrating them into a varied diet for long-term health benefits.

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The Best Fusion Food Trends in India You Must Know About.

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The Indian fusion food trends have redefined the culinary culture. Read more about the best fusion food restaurants in India and their fusion food cuisines.

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“World Health Day: Embracing Innovation & Equity through ‘My Health, My Right’” highlights the 2024 World Health Day theme, which focuses on ensuring that everyone, everywhere has access to quality health services, education, and information. The theme underscores the importance of health as a fundamental human right and calls for innovative solutions to bridge the gaps in healthcare access and equity

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“World Health Day: Embracing Innovation & Equity through ‘My Health, My Right’” highlights the 2024 World Health Day theme, which focuses on ensuring that everyone, everywhere has access to quality health services, education, and information. The theme underscores the importance of health as a fundamental human right and calls for innovative solutions to bridge the gaps in healthcare access and equity

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Due to the ongoing global health challenges, including pandemics, climate change, and socio-economic disparities. The emphasis on innovation and equity is crucial as it encourages the development of new technologies and policies that can make healthcare more accessible and inclusive. By advocating for “My Health, My Right,” the campaign aims to foster a culture of inclusivity and compassion, ensuring that no one is left behind in the pursuit of good health

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World Health Day: Embracing Innovation & Equity through “My Health, My Right” - Elets eHealth

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In an era marked by unprecedented challenges, the value of good health has never been more apparent. From the corridors of power to the humblest communities, the call for accessible, quality healthcare reverberates louder than ever before.

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Explores gender-fluid fashion, highlighting its significance in challenging traditional gender norms and promoting inclusivity, self-expression, and the breaking down of binary boundaries.

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Explores gender-fluid fashion, highlighting its significance in challenging traditional gender norms and promoting inclusivity, self-expression, and the breaking down of binary boundaries.

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Ever since Jaden Smith wore that Louis Vuitton skirt, I've read more articles about fashion's so-called "gender-fluid movement" than I can count. I've read listicles that proclaim gender-bending style as fashion's future, interviews in which designers proudly describe their binary-busting bona fides, op-eds pointing to gender fluidity as an antidote to toxic masculinity, as well as plenty of reviews playfully hailing the disruptive potential of men wearing this and women wearing that. Having read enough of these pieces, it would seem we are living in an unprecedented period of gender upheaval, a time when traditional expectations of what constitutes men's and women's dress are being blended, blurred, even reimagined altogether. Of course, this isn't entirely the case.
Read more: Laverne Cox Is British Vogue's First Trans Cover Star
What we now call gender-bending fashion has existed as long as there have been gender norms to bend - which is to say long, long before Jaden's 2016 moment. Yet, even if not necessarily new, something about today's fixation with fluidity feels different - at once more substantial and politically engaged. More than ever, the gender-bending we've grown accustomed to seeing on the runway is accompanied by a growing awareness of and sensitivity to the experiences of trans and gender non-conforming (trans&gnc) individuals - people for whom the bending of gender is not merely a style, but an identity.

In fact, I identify as such a person; more specifically, as non-binary and transfeminine, terms I've chosen to describe myself as someone who generally presents more femme, though prefers not to locate their selfhood in terms of the traditional male/female divide. Because fashion has always been one of the most useful tools for carving a space for myself to experiment with my identity, I've been thrilled to see more brands thinking critically, publicly, and creatively about their relationship to gender. But, as with any instance in which queerness is rendered to serve commercial purposes, I've wondered: What's at stake? And what might be gained for my community through mainstream fashion's involvement in the larger cultural "gender-fluid movement"?

To answer this question, I spoke to some of the most influential queer and trans&gnc folks in fashion, including Pierre Davis of No Sesso, Eden Loweth of Art School, Charles Jeffrey of Loverboy, model and activist Munroe Bergdorf, actor Ezra Miller, and model and actress Ava Grey. Through these conversations, the first thing that became clear was the need to distinguish gender-fluid fashion from what is often called gender-neutral, androgynous, or unisex fashion. Where the latter aims to disrupt established norms through dull, often billowing garments meant to transcend suits and skirts, the former strives toward the same goal by disentangling the normative association between skirts and women, suits and men.

As for the extent to which gender-fluid versus gender-neutral fashion benefits the trans&gnc community, there's really no competition. Gender-neutral fashion, even if well-intentioned, almost immediately wilts as a means of furthering a progressive gender politics. To collapse gender expression into a wash of baggy black jumpers inevitably overlooks trans people who wear skirts and suits to affirm their identities. As Ezra Miller tells me: "Gender itself is not our enemy and it will never really be over because it's a vital aspect of existence... but if you want it, we can see a world in which we are liberated from the bonds of it and nourished by the joys and beauty of it." The point, then, is not to act as if gender doesn't exist, but rather to reorient ourselves toward embracing the myriad and beautiful ways in which it does.

According to model and trans activist, Ava Grey, one way the gender-fluid movement in fashion could help our culture engage this necessary reorientation is through emboldening more trans&gnc representation. "When queer-identifying youth see queer representation on the runway and in media, we become symbols of hope for them," says Grey. "We show them lives that have been able to move past the constant bullying and negative statistics."

Echoing the appeal to the benefits of increased representation is Charles Jeffrey, designer of the fearlessly avant-garde label, Charles Jeffrey Loverboy. Jeffrey, who doesn't identify as trans himself, nevertheless brings to his work one of the most ruthless attitudes toward binary definitions of gender in current design. "I think the positives of a bigger global conversation about gender outweigh any negatives," he told me via email, adding: "From what I've seen in culture, in and outside of fashion, there's indisputably more diversity, inclusivity and also information about trans and gender-non-confirming people. It's real - real people, being able to give themselves their own platform to communicate their journeys."

But as Munroe Bergdorf points out, trans-inclusive casting is just the beginning. "What we need to be doing is making sure that fashion is as inclusive behind the scenes as it is in front of the camera or on the runway." According to Bergdorf (who recently founded GODDESS, an online platform geared toward community building among women, trans and non-binary folks, and people who are intersex) ensuring that the recent mainstream interest in gender fluidity outlives its trendy status requires an appreciation that "trans people are more than just trans and can be part of a team, can be part of a project without their transness being the focal point, or even an issue for other people".

Even while creating opportunities for greater representation, large companies' involvement in today's gender-fluid movement risks overshadowing the work of more authentic, more community-oriented labels. Art School's Eden Loweth goes so far as to contend that there are two gender-fluid movements: one constituted by the bandwagon-hopping large and small houses, and another composed of labels like their own, or Davis's No Sesso, brands that emerged from the trans&gnc community and involve them from the studio, to the runway, to the store.

For Loweth, gender-fluid fashion is anything but a trend. It's their work. It's also their life. It is about honoring and supporting their community, not, as they tell me, "monetizing something that is almost day-to-day hate for people like me on the streets. When I moved to London, trans women were a major force in my life that really protected me as quite a naïve young person living in a really big city," they add. "Having those women involved in the actual process of us doing fittings is so informative, because they all have their own requirements. Their bodies are changing almost daily if they're on hormone treatment, and that's the basis of where we started working out what we wanted to do."
Read more: "She Was Our Seer, Our Oracle, Our Liberator": Writer Kuchenga Pays Tribute To Toni Morrison
The effect of this authentic approach is clearest in the clothes, according to Munroe Bergdorf, who's walked for Art School and has joined the designers in advocating for a non-binary option on official British documentation. "It's more about the wearer and making sure that the clothing fits the body, not the body fits the clothes," she says of the label. "Usually a dress would be made on a body to fit a mannequin essentially. And that's why a lot of models look the same," Bergdorf explains. "But they've taken into consideration the differences of trans bodies."

It is this level of concern - not only for how the clothes look, but also for what they mean to a wearer - that often seems lost on brands from Zara to Thom Browne, companies whose forays into questions of gender expression and identity pierce no deeper than a collection of wearable picnic blankets, or runway shows that present gender fluidity as the stuff of the avant-garde rather than the everyday. "Are these brands donating to these communities that inspire their runways?" No Sesso's Pierre Davis asks, underscoring the opportunistic relationship between labels that benefit from the illusion of progressive politics without more robustly supporting the communities that influence their designs. "A lot of these big brands say that they're designing gender-friendly clothing, but the margin that's able to buy these pieces is just rich people," she continues.

And that's assuming these brands intend to sell their more gender fluid pieces at all. Of course, the runway has always been a place for experimentation, yet there's certainly something disingenuous when brands show collections that refute the binary before selling their clothes within the same divisive categories of men's and womenswear that they've used for years. "For brands that want to almost use gender as a way of being provocative or exciting and contemporary, they're not actually talking about the issues that matter," says Bergdorf. "They're taking the top line, which is trend, and not speaking about the realities, which is not fabulous all the time. It's not fashion all the time. It's survival."
Read more: Christy Turlington Burns On How To Become A (Quiet, But Devastatingly Effective) Activist
Bergdorf is right. According to Stonewall, more than four in five trans youth have endured verbal abuse; three in five have endured threatening behavior; and nearly 40 per cent have experienced physical assault. In many ways, to be trans in the world today is to live in danger and, understandably, in fear - a truth that strikes a sour note when told against the backdrop of a fashion industry that encourages pushing gendered boundaries without more robustly speaking out regarding the pervasive dangers associated with doing so. Indeed, one of the more concerning aspects of the fashion industry's involvement in the gender-fluid movement is its propensity for conflating expression and identity, erasing trans&gnc people who don't, or can't, express their authentic selves safely.

Mainstream fashion's involvement in today's gender-fluid movement has no doubt helped expand countless people's perception of how men and women can dress. It has even exposed the public to a fuller picture of the whole constellation of genders with which one might identify. But if it is to earn a fraction of the political potency it has already seemed to claim for itself, the industry must not only continue to employ and celebrate its trans&gnc members, but also make a more substantial investment in the lives - and not simply the looks - of the broader trans&gnc community. "This is not just fashion," says Pierre Davis. "This is a lifestyle and it needs to be taken seriously."
More from British Vogue:

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There's More At Stake With Fashion's Gender-Fluid Movement Than You Realise

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"The industry must make a more substantial investment in the lives - and not simply the looks - of the broader trans&gnc community," says Wren Sanders

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1. Narayana Murthy suggests youngsters work 70 hours weekly ¹.

2. He believes this will boost India’s productivity ¹.

3. Murthy compares this to post-WWII Japan and Germany ¹.

4. He emphasizes discipline and hard work ¹.

5. Murthy also highlights issues like corruption and bureaucracy ¹.

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Narayana Murthy says India’s work culture must change: ‘Youngsters should work 70 hours a week’

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Narayana Murthy called for more discipline and improvement in work productivity. ‘Our culture has to change to that of highly determined, extremely disciplined and extremely hard-working people,’ he said.

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Redefining Boundaries: The Modern Landscape of Gender Equality

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Redefining Boundaries: The Modern Landscape of Gender Equality

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In today's world, gender equality manifests in diverse forms, reflecting progress across various sectors, including politics, education, and the workplace. It encompasses equal access to opportunities, resources, and rights, transcending traditional gender roles and biases. From female leadership in business to inclusive policies that support both men and women in caregiving roles, the movement toward gender parity continues to evolve. Yet, challenges persist, highlighting the need for ongoing advocacy and systemic change to ensure that all individuals, regardless of gender, can thrive and contribute to society without barriers.

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Progress towards gender equality is looking bleak. But it doesn't need to.

A new global analysis of progress on gender equality and women's rights shows women and girls remain disproportionately affected by the socioeconomic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, struggling with disproportionately high job and livelihood losses, education disruptions and increased burdens of unpaid care work. Women's health services, poorly funded even before the pandemic, faced major disruptions, undermining women's sexual and reproductive health. And despite women's central role in responding to COVID-19, including as front-line health workers, they are still largely bypassed for leadership positions they deserve.

UN Women's latest report, together with UN DESA, Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot 2021 presents the latest data on gender equality across all 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The report highlights the progress made since 2015 but also the continued alarm over the COVID-19 pandemic, its immediate effect on women's well-being and the threat it poses to future generations.

We're breaking down some of the findings from the report, and calling for the action needed to accelerate progress.

The pandemic is making matters worse

One and a half years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the toll on the poorest and most vulnerable people remains devastating and disproportionate. The combined impact of conflict, extreme weather events and COVID-19 has deprived women and girls of even basic needs such as food security. Without urgent action to stem rising poverty, hunger and inequality, especially in countries affected by conflict and other acute forms of crisis, millions will continue to suffer.

A global goal by global goal reality check:
Goal 1. Poverty
In 2021, extreme poverty is on the rise and progress towards its elimination has reversed. An estimated 435 million women and girls globally are living in extreme poverty.

And yet we can change this.

Over 150 million women and girls could emerge from poverty by 2030 if governments implement a comprehensive strategy to improve access to education and family planning, achieve equal wages and extend social transfers.
Goal 2. Zero hunger
The global gender gap in food security has risen dramatically during the pandemic, with more women and girls going hungry. Women's food insecurity levels were 10 per cent higher than men's in 2020, compared with 6 per cent higher in 2019.

This trend can be reversed, including by supporting women small-scale producers, who typically earn far less than men, through increased funding, training and land rights reforms.
Goal 3. Good health and well-being
Disruptions in essential health services due to COVID-19 are taking a tragic toll on women and girls. In the first year of the pandemic, there were an estimated 1.4 million additional unintended pregnancies in lower and middle-income countries.

We need to do better.

Response to the pandemic must include prioritizing sexual and reproductive health services, ensuring they continue to operate safely now and after the pandemic is long over. In addition, more support is needed to ensure life-saving personal protection equipment, tests, oxygen and especially vaccines are available in rich and poor countries alike as well as to vulnerable population within countries.
Goal 4. Quality education
A year and a half into the pandemic, schools remain partially or fully closed in 42 per cent of the world's countries and territories. School closures spell lost opportunities for girls and an increased risk of violence, exploitation and early marriage.

Governments can do more to protect girls education.

Measures focused specifically on supporting girls returning to school are urgently needed, including measures focused on girls from marginalized communities who are most at risk.
Goal 5. Gender equality
The pandemic has tested and even reversed progress in expanding women's rights and opportunities. Reports of violence against women and girls, a "shadow" pandemic to COVID-19, are increasing in many parts of the world. COVID-19 is also intensifying women's workload at home, forcing many to leave the labour force altogether.

And yet we can change this.

Building forward differently and better will hinge on placing women and girls at the centre of all aspects of response and recovery, including through gender-responsive laws, policies and budgeting.
Goal 6. Clean water and sanitation
In 2018, nearly 2.3 billion people lived in water-stressed countries. Without safe drinking water, adequate sanitation and menstrual hygiene facilities, women and girls find it harder to lead safe, productive and healthy lives.

Change is possible.

Involve those most impacted in water management processes, including women. Women's voices are often missing in water management processes.
Goal 7. Affordable and clean energy
Increased demand for clean energy and low-carbon solutions is driving an unprecedented transformation of the energy sector. But women are being left out. Women hold only 32 per cent of renewable energy jobs.

We can do better.

Expose girls early on to STEM education, provide training and support to women entering the energy field, close the pay gap and increase women's leadership in the energy sector.
Goal 8. Decent work and economic growth
The number of employed women declined by 54 million in 2020 and 45 million women left the labour market altogether. Women have suffered steeper job losses than men, along with increased unpaid care burdens at home.

We must do more to support women in the workforce.

Guarantee decent work for all, introduce labour laws/reforms, removing legal barriers for married women entering the workforce, support access to affordable/quality childcare.
Goal 9. Industry, innovation and infrastructure
The COVID-19 crisis has spurred striking achievements in medical research and innovation. Women's contribution has been profound. But still only a little over a third of graduates in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics field are female.
We can take action today.
Quotas mandating that a proportion of research grants are awarded to women-led teams or teams that include women is one concrete way to support women researchers.
Goal 10. Reduced inequalities
Limited progress for women is being eroded by the pandemic. Women facing multiple forms of discrimination, including women and girls with disabilities, migrant women, women discriminated against because of their race/ethnicity are especially affected.

We need to do better.

Commit to end racism and discrimination in all its forms, invest in inclusive, universal, gender responsive social protection systems that support all women.
Goal 11. Sustainable cities and communities
Globally, more than 1 billion people live in informal settlements and slums. Women and girls, often overrepresented in these densely populated areas, suffer from lack of access to basic water and sanitation, health care and transportation.

The needs of urban poor women must be prioritized.

Increase the provision of durable and adequate housing and equitable access to land; included women in urban planning and development processes.
Goal 12. Sustainable consumption and production; Goal 13. Climate action; Goal 14. Life below water; and Goal 15. Life on land
Women activists, scientists and researchers are working hard to solve the climate crisis but often without the same platforms as men to share their knowledge and skills. Only 29 per cent of featured speakers at international ocean science conferences are women.

And yet we can change this.

Ensure women activists, scientists and researchers have equal voice, representation and access to forums where these issues are being discussed and debated.
Goal 16. Peace, justice and strong institutions
The lack of women in decision-making limits the reach and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and other emergency recovery efforts. In conflict-affected countries, 18.9 per cent of parliamentary seats are held by women, much lower than the global average of 25.6 per cent.

This is unacceptable.

It's time for women to have an equal share of power and decision-making at all levels.
Goal 17. Global partnerships for the goals
There are just 9 years left to achieve the Global Goals by 2030, and gender equality cuts across all 17 of them. With COVID-19 slowing progress on women's rights, the time to act is now.

Looking ahead

As it stands today, only one indicator under the global goal for gender equality (SDG5) is 'close to target': proportion of seats held by women in local government. In other areas critical to women's empowerment, equality in time spent on unpaid care and domestic work and decision making regarding sexual and reproductive health the world is far from target. Without a bold commitment to accelerate progress, the global community will fail to achieve gender equality. Building forward differently and better will require placing women and girls at the centre of all aspects of response and recovery, including through gender-responsive laws, policies and budgeting.

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feature-what does gender equality look like today

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What does gender equality look like today?

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A new global analysis of progress on gender equality and women's rights shows women and girls remain disproportionately affected by the socioeconomic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, struggling with disproportionately high job and livelihood losses, education disruptions and increased burdens of unpaid care work.

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Celebrating Love and Diversity: LGBTQIA+ Pride Month 2023

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Celebrating Love and Diversity: LGBTQIA+ Pride Month 2023

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Honoring the history, achievements, and struggles of the LGBTQIA+ community. Across the globe, pride parades, educational events, and cultural activities united millions in a powerful display of love, acceptance, and solidarity. This year’s theme emphasized the importance of inclusivity and representation, reminding us of the ongoing fight for equality and the rights of all individuals, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Through art, activism, and personal stories, the month served as a reminder to celebrate diversity and foster a more inclusive society for everyone.

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From the Library of Congress:

"Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Pride Month is currently celebrated each year in the month of June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan. The Stonewall Uprising was a tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States. In the United States the last Sunday in June was initially celebrated as 'Gay Pride Day,' but the actual day was flexible. In major cities across the nation the 'day' soon grew to encompass a month-long series of events. Today, celebrations include pride parades, picnics, parties, workshops, symposia and concerts, and LGBTQ Pride Month events attract millions of participants around the world. Memorials are held during this month for those members of the community who have been lost to hate crimes or HIV/AIDS. The purpose of the commemorative month is to recognize the impact that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals have had on history locally, nationally, and internationally."

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The 2021 American Community Survey estimated there were 1.2M same-sex couple households in the U.S., and of them, 59% (711,129) were married couples.

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Embracing the Spectrum: Understanding Sexuality Identity in Today's World

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Embracing the Spectrum: Understanding Sexuality Identity in Today's World

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Sexuality identity encompasses the diverse ways individuals understand and express their sexual orientation and preferences. It reflects a broad spectrum, including identities such as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, and many more. As society becomes more inclusive, recognizing and respecting each person's unique journey in exploring their sexuality is essential for fostering acceptance and promoting mental well-being. This exploration not only shapes personal relationships but also plays a vital role in cultural and social dynamics, inviting ongoing dialogue about identity, love, and belonging.

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What Is LBGTQ? | Sexual Identity Topics For Teens

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If you're a LGBTQ teen or ally, there are lots of resources to help you get the support and info you need as you work to understand yourself better.

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Emotional marketing is trending as brands leverage personal connections to foster loyalty and stand out in a saturated market. By evoking emotions like nostalgia or empathy, companies resonate with consumers' values and experiences, making their messages more impactful. As consumers seek authenticity and meaningful connections, emotional marketing has become a key strategy for engagement.

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Emotional marketing is trending as brands leverage personal connections to foster loyalty and stand out in a saturated market. By evoking emotions like nostalgia or empathy, companies resonate with consumers' values and experiences, making their messages more impactful. As consumers seek authenticity and meaningful connections, emotional marketing has become a key strategy for engagement.

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Idea in Brief

The Problem
Companies know that emotions drive customer behavior, but most have little idea how to connect in ways that motivate the desired behaviors. The process is more guesswork than science.

The Solution
The authors have created a lexicon of "emotional motivators" and, using big data analytics, have linked them to specific profitable behaviors.

The Opportunity
By identifying the most powerful emotional motivators for a given customer segment, companies can design marketing and other strategies to leverage those motivators, giving them a new source of competitive advantage and growth.

When companies connect with customers' emotions, the payoff can be huge. Consider these examples: After a major bank introduced a credit card for Millennials that was designed to inspire emotional connection, use among the segment increased by 70% and new account growth rose by 40%. Within a year of launching products and messaging to maximize emotional connection, a leading household cleaner turned market share losses into double-digit growth. And when a nationwide apparel retailer reoriented its merchandising and customer experience to its most emotionally connected customer segments, same-store sales growth accelerated more than threefold.

Given the enormous opportunity to create new value, companies should pursue emotional connections as a science-and a strategy. But for most, building these connections is more guesswork than science. At the end of the day they have little idea what really works and whether their efforts have produced the desired results.

Our research across hundreds of brands in dozens of categories shows that it's possible to rigorously measure and strategically target the feelings that drive customers' behavior. We call them "emotional motivators." They provide a better gauge of customers' future value to a firm than any other metric, including brand awareness and customer satisfaction, and can be an important new source of growth and profitability.

At the most basic level, any company can begin a structured process of learning about its customers' emotional motivators and conducting experiments to leverage them, later scaling up from there. At the other end of the spectrum, firms can invest in deep research and big data analytics or engage consultancies with specific expertise. Companies in financial services, retail, health care, and technology are now using a detailed understanding of emotional connection to attract and retain the most valuable customers. The most sophisticated firms are making emotional connection part of a broad strategy that involves every function in the value chain, from product development and marketing to sales and service.

Hundreds of "emotional motivators" drive consumer behavior. Below are 10 that significantly affect customer value across all categories studied.

In what follows we'll describe our research and our work with companies-to our knowledge, the first to show direct, robust links among specific emotional motivators, a firm's actions to leverage them, consumer behavior, and business outcomes.

Defining Emotional Motivators

Our research stemmed from our frustration that companies we worked with knew customers' emotions were important but couldn't figure out a consistent way to define them, connect with them, and link them to results. We soon discovered that there was no standard lexicon of emotions, and so eight years ago we set out to create one, working with experts and surveying anthropological and social science research. We ultimately assembled a list of more than 300 emotional motivators. We consider customers to be emotionally connected with a brand when it aligns with their motivations and helps them fulfill deep, often unconscious, desires. Important emotional motivators include desires to "stand out from the crowd," "have confidence in the future," and "enjoy a sense of well-being," to name just a few.

Identifying and measuring emotional motivators is complicated, because customers themselves may not even be aware of them. These sentiments are typically different from what customers say are the reasons they make brand choices and from the terms they use to describe their emotional responses to particular brands. What's more, as we'll discuss, emotional connections with products are neither uniform nor constant; they vary by industry, brand, touchpoint, and the customer's position in the decision journey.

Why Emotional Connections Matter

Although brands may be liked or trusted, most fail to align themselves with the emotions that drive their customers' most profitable behaviors. Some brands by nature have an easier time making such connections, but a company doesn't have to be born with the emotional DNA of Disney or Apple to succeed. Even a cleaning product or a canned food can forge powerful connections.

Identifying and leveraging customers' emotional motivators can be broken into three phases.

First, inventory your existing market research and customer insight data. You will probably find qualitative descriptions of your customers' motivating emotions, such as what aspects of life they value most (family, community, freedom, security) and what they aspire to day-to-day and in the future. From there, pursue research to add detail to your understanding of those emotions. Define a set of emotional motivators to probe-the list in the exhibit "High-Impact Motivators" will provide ideas, as will your qualitative research. Online surveys can help you quantify the relevance of individual motivators. Are your customers more driven by life in the moment or by future goals? Do they place greater value on social acceptance or on individuality? Don't assume you know what motivates customers just because you know who they are. Young parents may be motivated by a desire to provide security for their families-or by an urge to escape and have some fun (you will probably find both types in your customer base). And don't undermine your understanding of customers' emotions by focusing on how people feel about your brand or how they say it makes them feel. You need to understand their underlying motivations separate from your brand.

Second, analyze your best customers-those who buy and advocate the most, are the least price-sensitive, and are the most loyal. To do this, identify those who are highly satisfied with your brand-whatever the degree of their emotional connection-and divide them into quartiles according to annual purchases, advocacy, and so on. Examine the top quartile to see how the characteristics and behavior of your best customers differ from those of people in the other quartiles. Look at demographics, whether people buy in person or online, how much they buy from your competitors, and where they get their information about your brand (traditional media, social networks, and so on). Compare the emotional motivators of your best customers with the ones you've researched for your overall customer base and see which are specific or more important to the high-value group. Find the two or three of these key motivators that have a strong association with your brand. They will serve as an initial guide to the emotions you need to connect with in order to grow the most valuable customer segment of your business and to the marketing strategies and customer experience tactics that will provide the greatest connection opportunities.

Third, make the organization's commitment to emotional connection a key lever for growth. Use the language of emotional connection when you talk about your customers-not just in the marketing department but across the firm. In our experience, successful strategies based on emotional connection require buy-in from the top and must be embraced across functions. For example, if people in product development are working on a version that's easier to use, they shouldn't just ask whether customers will be satisfied with it; they should learn which emotional motivators it resonates with and how it will strengthen emotional connections.

The process, in brief, looks like this: Applying big data analytics to detailed customer-data sets, we first identify the emotional motivators for a category's most valuable customers. High-value automobile customers, for example, might want to "feel a sense of belonging" and "feel a sense of freedom." Next we use statistical modeling to look at a large number of customers and brands, comparing survey results about people's emotional motivators with their purchase behavior and identifying spikes in buying that are associated with specific motivators. This reveals which motivators generate the most-profitable customer behaviors in the category. We then quantify the current and potential value of motivators for a given brand and help identify strategies to leverage them.

The model also allows us to compare the value of making strong emotional connections with that of scoring well on standard customer metrics such as satisfaction and brand differentiation, thus highlighting the potential gains from looking beyond traditional measures. We find that customers become more valuable at each step of a predictable "emotional connection pathway" as they transition from (1) being unconnected to (2) being highly satisfied to (3) perceiving brand differentiation to (4) being fully connected.

Although customers exhibit increasing connection at each step, their value increases dramatically when they reach the fourth step: Fully connected customers are 52% more valuable, on average, than those who are just highly satisfied. In fact, their relative value is striking across a variety of metrics, such as purchases and frequency of use.

The pathway is an important guide to where companies should invest-and it reveals that they often invest in the wrong places. To increase revenue and market share, many companies focus on turning dissatisfied customers into satisfied ones. However, our analysis shows that moving customers from highly satisfied to fully connected can have three times the return of moving them from unconnected to highly satisfied. And the highest returns we've seen have come from focusing on customers who are already fully connected to the category-from maximizing their value and attracting more of them to your brand.

Four insights from our research are especially relevant to firms looking to build on emotional connection.

Emotional motivators vary by category and brand.

Of the 300-plus motivators we've identified, 25 significantly affect customer value across all the categories we've analyzed. Anywhere from five to 15 additional motivators are important in any given category. For example, the sense that a home furnishings store "helps me be creative" inspires consumers to shop there more often. The wish to "feel revived and refreshed" drives loyalty to fast-food restaurants. Emotional motivators also vary within categories, depending on the desires of brands' most valuable customers. Because brands differ in how well they align with their customers' motivators, each may have a different starting point in any effort to strengthen emotional connections-and that point won't necessarily relate to conventional measures of brand perception.

Emotional motivators vary across customer segments.

Recall the credit card designed with Millennials in mind. Our model uncovered desires to "protect the environment" and "be the person I want to be" as key motivators in the banking category for that age group. (Traditional industry motivators such as desires to "feel secure" and to "succeed in life" are more typical of older groups.) The bank crafted messaging and features to connect to those sentiments, leading to its fastest-growing new credit card.

Emotional motivators for a given brand or industry vary with a person's position in the customer journey.

In banking, the desire to "feel secure" is a critical motivator when attracting and retaining customers early on. When cross-selling products later, the wish to "succeed in life" becomes more important. To maximize results, companies must align their emotional-connection strategies with their specific customer-engagement objectives-acquisition, retention, cross-selling, and so on.

Emotional-connection-driven growth opportunities exist across the customer experience, not just in traditional brand positioning and advertising.

For example, social media can have a big impact on emotional connection. One condiments brand found that 60% of its social-network-affiliated customers (especially followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest)-versus 21% of all customers-were emotionally connected. It accelerated growth in a matter of months by increasing its focus on its social media network, developing its online customer community, and pointing customers to the website for recipes and promotions.

Putting Emotional Connections to Work

Let's look at how an emotional-connection strategy paid off for a national fashion retailer. The company was struggling with common industry challenges. Although it had a well-known brand and a strong market presence, same-store sales were stagnating, and promotional pricing was shrinking margins. So it focused on cost management, logistical efficiency, and streamlining the merchandise and store mix-with limited success. Over the past two years we worked with the retailer on a four-part strategy to identify, understand, and quantify the value of the most emotionally connected customers. This exposed large, unexploited opportunities and allowed the retailer to better direct investments across the firm.

Further Reading

Marketing Digital Article

Advertising is still very much about the brand messaging business, not just the reaching the consumer on any device business.

1. Target connected customers.

We set out to answer two basic questions: How valuable were the retailer's fully connected customers, and could the company attract more of them? We used statistical techniques to measure the strength of customers' emotional connections with the retailer and with its competitors. The process began with surveys to discern how consumers related to key motivators in the category and with analysis to see which motivators best predicted purchase behavior. We then modeled the financial impact of building emotional connections with customers at each step on the pathway from unconnected to fully connected.

Our analysis showed that although fully connected customers constituted just 22% of customers in the category, they accounted for 37% of revenue and they spent, on average, twice as much annually ($400) as highly satisfied customers. Enhancing emotional connection could be a viable growth strategy if the retailer could attract fully connected customers from competitors, transform satisfied customers into fully connected ones, or both.

Further segmentation revealed a group of especially valuable customers. We labeled them Fashion Flourishers, because apparel connects to their deep desire for excitement, social acceptance, and self-expression. As a group, Flourishers are the most emotionally connected segment by far; half are already fully connected to the category. Comparing the ratios of various emotion-based segments' spending to those segments' size highlights extraordinary differences in value: Flourishers have a ratio of 1.9-nearly twice the market average and more than nine times that of the least-connected group (whom we called Can't Please Them, and whose ratio is just 0.2). Given the relatively fixed cost structure of retailing, acquiring and retaining Flourishers represented an opportunity to boost revenue and margins.

A detailed profile of Flourishers underscored their attractiveness and exposed ways for the retailer to target them. Customers in this segment:

have a high lifetime value, spending an average of $468 a year in the category, versus $235 for other customers.

shop more often and advocate more: Fully 46% of Flourishers shop key fashion categories at least monthly, versus 21% of all shoppers. Flourishers are 1.4 times as likely as other customers to recommend retailers to their friends and family members.

are less price-sensitive: They are 2.3 times as likely as other customers to say they are "willing to pay more for the best fashion products," 1.7 times less likely to make fashion purchase decisions solely on the basis of price, and 1.3 times less likely to shop for the lowest prices.

are predominantly female and younger, more ethnically diverse, and more likely to live in urban centers than other customers.

are more digitally engaged than other segments: They are 2.3 times as likely to research a fashion retailer online, 2.9 times as likely to shop for fashion products through their mobile devices, and 3.7 times as likely to follow a retailer on social media.

Drawing on these and other insights, the retailer created a blueprint for pursuing the most valuable customer opportunities. By applying the category segmentation scheme to the more than 25 million people in its customer database, it determined the financial value and behaviors of its own Flourishers, confirming that they spent substantially more than other customers and had the highest lifetime value and the lowest attrition and price sensitivity of any segment. It estimated that moving satisfied Flourishers up the pathway to full emotional connection could increase annual sales by 3% to 5%, and that luring Flourishers away from competitors could increase revenue by 5% to 8%. Because members of this group spend more per capita than other customers and turn over less often, the analysis also predicted improvements in operating margins and returns on capital.

Further Reading

Marketing Magazine Article

Most marketing organizations are stuck in the last century. Here's how the best meet the challenges of the digital age.

2. Quantify key motivators.

Next, by analyzing tens of thousands of Flourishers across the category, we quantified the impact of more than 40 motivators on the group's purchasing, spending, loyalty, and advocacy. We identified the most important category motivators-the ones that bore the strongest relationship to purchases-and assessed the retailer's competitive position in each. The financial analysis and modeling showed that further investments to strengthen the customer experience around the desires to "feel a sense of belonging," "feel a sense of thrill," and "feel a sense of freedom"-the motivators driving category purchase behavior and for which the retailer already had the strongest position-were likely to yield the highest ROI. Those motivators therefore became the focus of specific customer-experience investments.

3. Optimize investments across functions.

To maximize opportunities from emotional connection, companies must look beyond the marketing department. The retailer examined every function and customer touchpoint to find ways to enhance high-ROI emotional motivators. This brought four major investment areas into focus: stores, online and omnichannel experiences, merchandising, and message targeting.

Stores.

To estimate which of the retailer's more than 700 stores had the most Flourisher customers, we scored each one according to the presence of this segment in the store's trading area. We found that high-scoring stores generated up to 25% more revenue than others. Their same-store sales were growing twice as quickly, and their operating profit was 30% greater. Their profit margins were enhanced by 10% higher inventory turns and-consistent with expectations-by lower coupon usage. (Flourishers don't just say they're willing to pay more-they actually do pay more.)

These analytics changed the retailer's store location strategy. We mapped the concentrations of Flourishers in all U.S. markets and submarkets, along with the segment's propensities to shop at more than 150 other retailers. The company's real estate team now uses a predictive model to identify sites near Flourishers and also near other retailers they frequent.

The change is paying off. New stores in trading areas with high concentrations of Flourishers have first-year sales that are 20% higher than historical averages, leading to faster break-even times and higher returns on capital. Further analysis has revealed opportunities to open hundreds of stores catering to underserved Flourisher populations. To free up capital for new stores, the retailer is closing ones in low-Flourisher areas.

Emotional-connection analytics have also allowed the retailer to understand which aspects of the in-store shopping experience are most important to Flourishers. Because those qualities often aren't recognized by customers themselves, they had not informed store design. Flourishers say it's important that sales associates are easy to find, that clearance items are easy to locate, and that stores have free Wi-Fi. However, analysis showed that those aren't actually the features that drive their visits and purchases.

The "emotional connection score" (ECS) of a brand measures the share of customers who are fully connected. A gap between a brand's ECS and the share of customers who consider it a "good brand" signals an opportunity to transform satisfied customers into fully connected-and more valuable-ones. Gaps between a brand's ECS and competitors' indicate opportunities to seize (or maintain) advantage by attending to emotional connections.

SOURCE Scott Magids, Alan Zorfas, and Daniel Leemon
FROM "The New Science of Customer Emotions" © HBR.ORG

On the basis of its modeling, the retailer predicted that the option to purchase online and pick up in-store-something that few customers say is important and that was available only on a limited basis-would be a key driver of emotional connection (it speaks to Flourishers' desire to "feel a sense of freedom"). It tested targeted communication and in-store promotion of the option and saw a material lift in sales; it has now committed capital to a nationwide rollout of the capability. Similarly, the retailer predicted that seeing imagery in-store of "people like you" would drive emotional connection and purchasing among Flourishers (although they say that this factor is unimportant). As a test, it expanded its presence on photo-sharing social media sites and encouraged customers to submit selfies showing their favorite outfits and styles. Selfie slide shows are (with subjects' permission) displayed on large screens in test stores, thus addressing Flourishers' desire to "feel a sense of belonging." Research indicates that the segment has responded to this motivator and increased purchase intent.

The retailer is now designing and testing store experiences to leverage nearly a dozen other drivers of emotional connection.

Online and omnichannel experiences.

Like individual store environments, online and omnichannel experiences can be optimized for emotional connection. To this end the retailer quantified the impact of more than 100 omnichannel touchpoints on customers' emotional connection and spending. These included mobile app browsing and purchasing, visits to the retailer's social media pages, e-commerce site navigation, and in-store returns of merchandise bought online. Each touchpoint was scored according to its potential impact on emotional connection and spending. Statistical models then revealed the most powerful combinations of touchpoints at each stage of the customer journey, allowing the retailer to hone its omnichannel strategy and prioritize investments.

Further Reading

Customers Magazine Article

You can make ubiquitous advertising acceptable-even welcome-to consumers.

For example, Flourishers say that using a computer to shop online via an easy-to-use site is important to purchase decisions. In reality, the ease and allure of the mobile site and the availability of services such as ApplePay have a far greater impact on emotional connection and spending levels. The retailer is using such insights to design investments across e-commerce, mobile, and social media that will build emotional connections with Flourishers. For instance, it developed multiple concepts for the navigational redesign and aesthetic reskin of its mobile app, tested how effectively each version enhanced feelings of "freedom," "belonging," and "thrill" and drove purchases, and rolled out the best one.

Merchandising.

Merchandise selection, from the broad category level to specific labels, can be optimized to drive emotional connection. The retailer now tracks the purchasing habits of Flourishers nationwide through point-of-sale data collected from hundreds of retailers by independent research companies. By applying the Flourisher segmentation to these POS databases, it has modeled the segment's purchase behavior across more than 20 product categories and 100 labels and learned which of the approximately 10 competitive retailers these consumers buy from. The resulting insights have exposed gaps in merchandise important to Flourishers, and the retailer is working with its manufacturers to rebalance its mix.

Message targeting.

Having identified its Flourisher customers, the retailer can now send them personalized messages designed to resonate with the emotional motivators that drive behavior at each stage of the customer journey. For example, when Flourishers are initially considering the retailer, "having fun" while shopping is paramount. At the point of purchase, "helps me feel creative" emerges as key. Working from such insights, the retailer has developed a series of messages targeting Flourishers and timed according to their position in the journey: A rules engine sends out e-mails tailored to browsing, transacting, and servicing interactions. Response rates to this direct-marketing campaign are 40% to 210% higher than historical averages.

Beginning with a two-year research project involving literature review and social science experts, we identified 300 universal motivating emotions. To measure their impact on consumer behavior, we conducted intercept surveys of more than one million U.S. consumers through thousands of websites, gathering data across 30 industries and 400-plus brands that included measures of brand consideration, trial, repurchase, advocacy, customer satisfaction, brand differentiation, and emotional connection. Over six more years we collected more than one billion data points, including demographic and actual purchase data. Using analytical techniques such as multivariate regression and structural equation modeling, we determined which emotional motivators are most powerfully associated with customer behavior and customer value by category and by brand and the degree to which connecting to those motivators influences customer behavior, both in absolute terms and relative to more commonly measured drivers of behavior.

Media selection can also be finely tuned to boost emotional connection. We profiled the media consumption of Flourishers across 500 TV shows, 100 websites and social networks, 50 types of mobile apps, 80 print publications, and 20 types of radio programming. Working with its ad agency, the retailer is executing emotional-connection-based media plans. For example, knowing that Flourishers are enthusiastic users of Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, it has scaled up its programs on these platforms, which has increased its marketing ROI.

4. Systematize, measure, and learn.

Leveraging emotional connection does not require turning your business processes upside down; you can embed relevant strategies into existing work streams. This is most effectively done by making emotional connection a key performance indicator and including it on the cross-functional senior-management dashboard.

The retailer developed a scorecard that gives the CEO and the executive team a single-page view of customers' progression on the emotional-connection pathway, along with the increase or decrease in connected customers of the company and its key competitors. The scorecard shows the correlation of customers' emotional-connection scores with lifetime value measures such as annual spending, churn, and tenure. It also shows how the business impacts of specific emotions are trending and how Flourishers engage with key in-store and omnichannel touchpoints that drive emotional connection. In addition, the retailer includes emotional-connection metrics in its ongoing testing of media messages, store designs, and digital and mobile experiences.

The results of these strategic and operational changes are startling. Same-store sales for stores serving Flourishers realized growth of 3.5% over the past year, whereas annual same-store growth over the past five years has averaged just 1%. Inventory turns increased more than 25%. Market share and customer advocacy also grew (the number of customers recommending the retailer is up 20% year-over-year), contributing to record-high customer lifetime values. Underlying all these gains is a 20% rise in the company's emotional-connection score-largely the result of moving satisfied customers to full emotional connection.

The Management Imperative

Embracing an emotional-connection strategy across the organization requires deep customer insights, analytical capabilities, and, above all, a managerial commitment to align the organization with the new way of thinking. It's important that marketing not hoard the strategy as "its" domain (although the function can and should use emotional connection to demonstrate the direct financial impact of its spending). Instead, marketing must partner with other functions, teaching and socializing emotional connection. The retailer we profiled now uses emotional connection to drive alignment across the operations management team, the C-suite, and the boardroom. At the outset the CEO identified emotional connection as a strategy to restore profitable growth. The CFO and the chief strategy officer then "sized the financial prize," leading the heads of marketing, stores, customer experience, and merchandising to collaborate on an integrated strategy.

The advent of big data analytics brings clarity, discipline, and rigor to companies' long-held desire to connect with the customer emotions that truly matter. Emotional connections no longer have to be a mystery-they can be a new source of real competitive advantage and growth.

A version of this article appeared in the November 2015 issue (pp.66-74, 76) of Harvard Business Review.

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When a company connects with customers' emotions, the payoff can be huge. Yet building such connections is often more guesswork than science. To remedy that problem, the authors have created a lexicon of nearly 300 "emotional motivators" and, using big data analytics, have linked them to specific profitable behaviors.

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Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are gaining popularity as new community models for content creators. These groups use blockchain and smart contracts to manage and distribute revenue, allowing creators to form self-governed communities without intermediaries.

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Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are gaining popularity as new community models for content creators. These groups use blockchain and smart contracts to manage and distribute revenue, allowing creators to form self-governed communities without intermediaries.

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The New Creator Economy – DAOs, Community Ownership, and Cryptoeconomics

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By Nader Dabit I first had what I can only describe as a spiritual awakening about 10 years ago to the fact that technology would (figuratively) rule the world. And since then, I’ve been obsessed with wanting to understand how software works and how…

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER - the evolution of the work environment and life after work. Traditional models of work are being redefined by the need for flexibility, technological adaptation, and collaboration.From remote work to AI-driven job shifts and shared retirement living, the workforce is becoming more digital, adaptable, and interconnected, reflecting the evolving nature of modern life.

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER - the evolution of the work environment and life after work. Traditional models of work are being redefined by the need for flexibility, technological adaptation, and collaboration.From remote work to AI-driven job shifts and shared retirement living, the workforce is becoming more digital, adaptable, and interconnected, reflecting the evolving nature of modern life.

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 “Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, spotted eating hot dog in Times Square; internet calls it ‘billion-dollar hot dog’” captures a moment where Bill Gates, known for his immense wealth and philanthropic efforts, is seen enjoying a simple street food item in New York City. This juxtaposition of a billionaire indulging in an everyday pleasure resonates with many, highlighting his relatable side.

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 “Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, spotted eating hot dog in Times Square; internet calls it ‘billion-dollar hot dog’” captures a moment where Bill Gates, known for his immense wealth and philanthropic efforts, is seen enjoying a simple street food item in New York City. This juxtaposition of a billionaire indulging in an everyday pleasure resonates with many, highlighting his relatable side.

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In today’s context, this moment is particularly relevant as it coincides with Gates’ active participation in high-profile events like the UN General Assembly and the promotion of his new Netflix show, "What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates"¹ ². It serves as a reminder that even the most influential figures appreciate the simple joys of life, bridging the gap between their public persona and everyday experiences.

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Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and a prominent philanthropist, surprised the internet when he was seen purchasing a hot dog from a street vendor in Times Square, New York. Captured in a video, Gates was enjoying this classic New York treat. It appears that the billionaire was indulging in the snack as part of a shoot. The footage, shared on Instagram by photojournalist Elder Ordonez, quickly garnered significant attention online.

Bill Gates was spotted enjoying a hot dog in Times Square,(Instagram/elderordonez1)

(Also read: Dolly Chaiwala, who served tea to Bill Gates, charges ₹5 lakh, stays in 5-star hotel, claims Kuwait vlogger)

Watch the clips here:

Viral moments in New York

The videos of Gates enjoying his hot dog have attracted a flurry of reactions on social media, as people were amused to see the billionaire indulging in such a simple pleasure. Comments poured in, with many expressing their surprise and admiration. One user wrote, "Wow, even billionaires love a good hot dog!" while another chimed in, "Imagine running into Bill Gates at a hot dog stand!" Maria added, "He's just like us! Who knew Gates was a hot dog fan?" Deepak Patil stated, "Guess billionaires also have street food cravings." Meanwhile, Sarah Hennson joked, "Does Bill prefer mustard or ketchup?" and Aditya Sharma simply commented, "Iconic."

The laid-back moment with the hot dog seemed to resonate with many who appreciated seeing Gates in such an everyday setting. It showed that even one of the world's wealthiest men enjoys the simple pleasures that street food brings.

(Also read: Bill Gates enjoys tea made by Dolly Chaiwalla, says 'looking forward to many chai pe charcha')

Chai time in India

This isn't the first time Bill Gates has captured hearts with his love for street food. Earlier this year, during his trip to India, Gates shared a heartwarming video where he was seen savouring a cup of chai from a tea stall run by the famous social media influencer, Dolly Chaiwala. The video, which quickly went viral, showcased Gates immersing himself in India's vibrant street culture.

Check the post here:

In the Instagram post, Gates shared his appreciation for the creativity and innovation present in everyday Indian life, stating, "In India, you can find innovation everywhere you turn - even in the preparation of a simple cup of tea!" The video starts with Gates asking, "One chai, please," from Dolly Chaiwala, who then demonstrates his unique and artistic method of making tea.

As Gates sipped the steaming chai from a glass, he expressed his excitement about being back in India, highlighting the country's role as a hub for innovators who are dedicated to improving lives. Gates praised how even something as simple as making tea could be elevated to an art form. He wrapped up the video by looking forward to more "chai pe charcha" (discussions over tea), standing beside Dolly Chaiwala.

About Bill Gates' net worth

As per Forbes, Bill Gates ranks as the seventh richest man in the world, boasting a staggering net worth of $138.9 billion.

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Bill Gates spotted eating hot dog in Times Square, internet calls it 'billion-dollar hot dog'

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Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, was recently spotted enjoying a hot dog from a street vendor in Times Square, New York. | Trending

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER  - glamorization and over-talked-about nature of gender-related issues, from fashion and equality to LGBTQ+ visibility and discourse in academia. While these topics are critical and deserve attention, the repeated exposure in media and public conversations can sometimes reduce their depth and nuance, turning them into trends or superficial talking points rather than deeply understood and acted-upon social shifts

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER  - glamorization and over-talked-about nature of gender-related issues, from fashion and equality to LGBTQ+ visibility and discourse in academia. While these topics are critical and deserve attention, the repeated exposure in media and public conversations can sometimes reduce their depth and nuance, turning them into trends or superficial talking points rather than deeply understood and acted-upon social shifts

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AI-health World’s Lightest and Thinnest Smart Ring: RingConn Gen 2 Features.:12-day battery life, AI-powered health tracking, ultra-thin design, and comprehensive health monitoring, including sleep and stress metrics.

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AI-health World’s Lightest and Thinnest Smart Ring: RingConn Gen 2 Features.:12-day battery life, AI-powered health tracking, ultra-thin design, and comprehensive health monitoring, including sleep and stress metrics.

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Five key points about the RingConn Gen 2 smart ring:

1. Design: Thinnest and lightest smart ring at 2mm thick ¹.

2. Battery Life: Lasts up to 12 days on a single charge ¹.

3. Health Tracking: Monitors heart rate, blood oxygen, and sleep ¹.

4. Durability: IP68 rating for dust and water resistance ¹.

5. Convenience: No subscription fees for health data access ¹.

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Yanko Design - Modern Industrial Design News

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Before you go out on a limb buying a Galaxy or Oura ring, the RingConn Gen 2 already holds the title for being the thinnest/lightest smart ring. It still manages to also boast of a 2-week-long battery life, the ability to track your health and sleep with AI-powered insights, IP68 water resistance, and here's the kicker... a subscription-less smartphone app that gives you all your health data without hiding behind a paywall. With not one but TWO design awards under its belt, the RingConn Gen 2 boasts a $209 starting price - less than half of what its competitor's smart rings go for. Here's everything the Gen 2 can do...

Designer: RingConn

Click Here to Buy Now: $209 $299 (30% off). Hurry, only 742/5800 left! Raised over $1.3 million.

Lighter than an AirPod, Thinner than a Credit Card

I've long proclaimed the superiority of smart rings to smartwatches. They're ultimately a bunch of sensors hooked together - but the smart ring does offer a much more efficient format. It's minimalist, can be worn alongside other rings (you can't wear two watches), and all your data goes to your smartphone so your ring doesn't need to worry about having its own display. This translates to a MUCH longer battery life, and the absence of a second display to get addicted to or to have inundate you with notifications. Smart rings are almost ALWAYS designed to be entirely waterproof so you can even swim with them, and they usually last a week or more on a full charge, making them vastly more superior to smartwatches.

Weighing between 2-3 grams, the RingConn's Gen 2 is lighter than a single AirPod (which weighs 4 grams), and with a cross-section that's 2mm wide, the ring is also about as thin as your average credit card. That lightweight and sleek form factor makes it perfect for wearing all-day every day because chances are within a few hours of slipping it on, you'll forget you're wearing it. Meanwhile, the ring will be hard at work, tracking your sleep, fitness/activity, heart rate, body temperature, stress levels, sleep apnea, and even acting as your period calendar (for women wearers).

Comprehensive AI-powered Sleep + Health Tracking

The RingConn Gen 2 does everything any wrist-worn health tracker does, but better. Its upgraded photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors can measure heart rate, heart rate variability, and blood oxygen levels with great accuracy. These sensors are embedded in a design that takes advantage of the finger's unique anatomy, which allows for MUCH more precise readings compared to wrist-based devices. The temperature sensor gauges your temperature levels as well as fluctuations, pairing it with your heart rate data to get a sense of your stress levels or even if you're on your period. Combine all three with the accelerometer and the Gen 2 captures all your steps and other physical activity, tracking various sports from running to cycling, soccer, swimming, and a bunch more.

At the end of your day, the ring also tracks your sleep using AI. In 2024, RingConn unveiled its first transformer-based deep learning model for sleep apnea detection - the ring uses this AI-based learning model to identify sleep risk events that could be affecting your health - something other smart rings currently cannot because they haven't built out such AI models. The more you wear the ring, the more it learns and the more personalized it becomes, getting better at tracking and identifying your quality of sleep and even detecting any drops in blood oxygen caused by apnea events and obstructed breathing (snoring, etc.)

Fitness Insights without a Monthly Subscription

I can't stress this enough but your health should never be behind a paywall. It really doesn't make sense to buy a fitness tracker only to then have an app that gates pro-level health tracking metrics behind a subscription model. To that end, the RingConn Gen 2 makes a pretty bold claim of not hiding behind any sort of freemium or premium business model. The RingConn app, available for Android and iOS devices, is free to use, and locally backs up all your health data. This allows you to monitor your health even when your smartphone isn't connected to the internet. Picture yourself trekking in the wilderness with no cellular service but still being able to track your metrics in real-time.

Your health data is also compatible with leading fitness apps such as Apple Health and Google Health Connect, allowing you to comprehensively track workouts, sports, and all other activities within one singular dashboard. For specific insights, the RingConn app is still your go-to destination... and its sleep-tracking feature gives you a holistic look at your body's metrics through your entire sleep journey, allowing you to catch any potential concerning events immediately. The app also analyzes data throughout the day to provide a detailed stress index and ratio, helping you gain a clear understanding of your stress levels. Additionally, the RingConn Gen 2 features comprehensive menstrual health tracking right within the app, allowing users to monitor cycles, predict ovulation, and track symptoms for deeper insights into their health patterns.

Sleek Metal Design with 12-day Battery Life

The RingConn sports a hypoallergenic aerospace-grade titanium alloy exterior, while the inside of the ring has a medical-grade epoxy coating that allows the sensors to work accurately when in contact against the skin. Between these two layers lie all the hardware and sensors that power the Gen 2, along with a best-in-class battery. Lasting a stunning 5 more days than even the Galaxy and Oura rings, the RingConn Gen 2 boasts a 12-day battery life. It's rather impressive considering exactly how small and thin the Gen 2 ring is. When the ring runs low on charge, it comes with its own charging case that begins working the second you slip the ring into its cylindrical platform. A simple 2-hour charge brings the Gen 2 ring's battery to 100%, lasting nearly 2 weeks... and the case houses its own 500mAh battery so you can charge your ring without necessarily having the case plugged in.

The RingConn Gen 2 boasts a starting price of $209, which includes the ring itself, the charging case, and free global shipping. Upgrading to the $239 package also gives you a clear silicone ring protector and a separate bedside charging dock. The RingConn Gen 2 comes in 3 colors - Future Silver, Royal Gold, and Matte Black, across 9 sizes, ranging from a size #6 to a size #14 depending on your index finger's diameter.

Click Here to Buy Now: $209 $299 (30% off). Hurry, only 742/5800 left! Raised over $1.3 million.

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World's Lightest and Thinnest Smart Ring from RingConn boasts 12-day Battery and AI-health tracking - Yanko Design

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https://youtu.be/StPpYOGy1ec Before you go out on a limb buying a Galaxy or Oura ring, the RingConn Gen 2 already holds the title for being the thinnest/lightest smart ring.

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Sudha Murty highlighted that men and women are wired differently, noting that men may have a good IQ but often lack the emotional quotient (EQ) that women possess.

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Sudha Murty highlighted that men and women are wired differently, noting that men may have a good IQ but often lack the emotional quotient (EQ) that women possess.

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Rajya Sabha MP Sudha Murty has shared a video on gender equality in which she compared men and women to bicycle wheels, saying, "You can't move forward without the other." Adding that men and women are "wired differently", she further said that men may have a "good IQ (intelligence quotient) but they definitely don't have a good EQ (emotional quotient)".

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Men wired differently, may have a good IQ but not EQ: Sudha Murty

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rajya sabha mp sudha murty has shared a video on gender equality in which she compared men and women to bicycle wheels saying quotyou cant move forward without the otherquot adding that men and women are quotwired differentlyquot she further said that men may have a quotgood iq intelligence quotient but they definitely dont have a good eq emotional quotientquot

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The headline “Venezuela Becomes First Country to Lose All Glaciers Amid Global Warming Crisis” highlights a critical environmental issue. Venezuela has lost its last glacier, the Humboldt Glacier, due to rising global temperatures12. This event is significant as it underscores the severe impact of climate change, with glaciers being key indicators of global warming. 

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The headline “Venezuela Becomes First Country to Lose All Glaciers Amid Global Warming Crisis” highlights a critical environmental issue. Venezuela has lost its last glacier, the Humboldt Glacier, due to rising global temperatures12. This event is significant as it underscores the severe impact of climate change, with glaciers being key indicators of global warming. 

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1. Climate Change Impact: The disappearance of glaciers is a direct consequence of global warming, reflecting the broader environmental crisis.

2. Ecosystem Disruption: The loss of glaciers affects local water supplies and biodiversity, impacting both human and natural systems.

3. Global Implications: This event serves as a warning for other regions, highlighting the need for immediate and sustained climate action to mitigate further losses ¹ ².

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Venezuela becomes first country to lose all glaciers amid global warming crisis

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Venezuela has become the first country in modern history to lose all its glaciers, highlighting the urgent reality of climate change. Scientists have reclassified the Humboldt Glacier, Venezuela’s last remaining glacier, as an ice field, signaling the end of an era for the Andean nation.

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER -  culinary innovations and the human desire for health-conscious, sustainable, and alternative food solutions. From plant-based substitutes to fermented beverages like kombucha, these trends reflect a broader movement towards innovative dietary choices that cater to evolving consumer preferences

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER -  culinary innovations and the human desire for health-conscious, sustainable, and alternative food solutions. From plant-based substitutes to fermented beverages like kombucha, these trends reflect a broader movement towards innovative dietary choices that cater to evolving consumer preferences

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER - the human desire to fit in, particularly in the context of societal pressures, online behaviors, and the implications of trends and cancel culture.these articles reflect the deeper human needs for acceptance, validation, and belonging, often influenced by societal pressures, media portrayals, and the ever-changing landscape of digital culture.

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER - the human desire to fit in, particularly in the context of societal pressures, online behaviors, and the implications of trends and cancel culture.these articles reflect the deeper human needs for acceptance, validation, and belonging, often influenced by societal pressures, media portrayals, and the ever-changing landscape of digital culture.

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Fusing Creativity: How Art and Technology Collaborate for Innovation

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Fusing Creativity: How Art and Technology Collaborate for Innovation

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The integration of art and technology has opened new horizons, where creativity meets cutting-edge advancements. Artists now leverage digital tools, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality to enhance their creative processes, while technologists incorporate artistic perspectives to design more intuitive and human-centered innovations. This collaboration enriches both fields, driving innovation in areas such as digital art, immersive experiences, and sustainable design solutions, ultimately reshaping how we create, experience, and interact with the world around us.

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How Art and Technology Can Work Together to Facilitate Healing — AMT Lab @ CMU

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When it comes to the widely discussed topic of mental health, the arts have proven to play a significant role in healing. In fact, artists and scientists have been researching impacts of art on the brain and body for nearly 75 years. The founding hypothesis in art therapy research emerged from the p

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The increasing consumer demand for fast, often same-day or next-day, delivery of goods and services. Driven by advancements in logistics and technology, companies are focusing on speed and efficiency to meet customer expectations.

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The increasing consumer demand for fast, often same-day or next-day, delivery of goods and services. Driven by advancements in logistics and technology, companies are focusing on speed and efficiency to meet customer expectations.

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This culture has reshaped industries like retail, food delivery, and e-commerce, pushing businesses to innovate in areas such as automation, last-mile delivery solutions, and real-time tracking to ensure rapid fulfillment while maintaining customer satisfaction.

4o

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A consumer’s experience driving an investor’s writeup

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While personalized feeds are not new, advanced AI algorithms are now tailoring not just content but also timing and frequency of posts to individual user behavior. This results in hyper-personalized experiences that go beyond simple interest matching to create unique, optimized user journeys.

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While personalized feeds are not new, advanced AI algorithms are now tailoring not just content but also timing and frequency of posts to individual user behavior. This results in hyper-personalized experiences that go beyond simple interest matching to create unique, optimized user journeys.

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Breaking Barriers: Unpacking the Real Challenges Facing Women Today

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Breaking Barriers: Unpacking the Real Challenges Facing Women Today

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Despite significant strides toward gender equality, many women still face barriers that hinder their personal and professional growth. From systemic discrimination and cultural biases to societal expectations and lack of representation, these challenges can manifest in various aspects of life, including the workplace, education, and family dynamics. Understanding the root causes of these obstacles is crucial for empowering women to overcome them and create a more equitable future for all. This exploration delves into the multifaceted issues that hold women back and highlights the need for continued advocacy and systemic change.

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Ask people to explain why women remain so dramatically underrepresented in the senior ranks of most companies, and you will hear from the vast majority a lament that goes something like this: High-level jobs require extremely long hours, women's devotion to family makes it impossible to put in those hours, and so their careers inevitably suffer.

Not so, say the authors, who spent 18 months working with a global consulting firm that wanted to know why it had so few women in positions of power. Although virtually every employee the authors interviewed related a form of the standard explanation, the firm's data told a different story. Women weren't being held back because of trouble balancing work and family; men, too, suffered from that problem and nevertheless advanced. Women were held back because they were encouraged to take accommodations, such as going part-time and shifting to internally facing roles, which derailed their careers.

The real culprit in women's stalled advancement, the authors conclude, is a general culture of overwork that hurts both sexes and locks gender equality in place. To solve this problem, they argue, we must reconsider what we're willing to allow the workplace to demand of all employees.

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Ask people to explain why women remain so dramatically underrepresented in the senior ranks of most companies, and you will hear from the vast majority a lament that goes something like this: High-level jobs require extremely long hours, women's devotion to family makes it impossible to put in those hours, and so their careers inevitably suffer.

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Navigating the Silent Struggle: Mental Health Challenges Among Students Today

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Navigating the Silent Struggle: Mental Health Challenges Among Students Today

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In an era marked by academic pressure, social media influence, and a rapidly changing world, students are facing unprecedented mental health challenges. Issues such as anxiety, depression, and burnout have become alarmingly common, affecting their academic performance and overall well-being. The stigma surrounding mental health often discourages open dialogue, leaving many to grapple with their struggles in silence. It is crucial for educational institutions, families, and peers to foster supportive environments that prioritize mental health awareness and provide accessible resources for those in need.

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Mental health issues that students are facing today

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As we speak there is one suicide attempt every three seconds and one death by suicide every forty seconds by our youth. These statistics alone are alarming enough to take cognizance of the fact that mental health among students is going to be the next crisis.

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the concept of green balconies, highlighting their role in enhancing urban living spaces by providing areas for social interaction, relaxation, and environmental benefits.

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the concept of green balconies, highlighting their role in enhancing urban living spaces by providing areas for social interaction, relaxation, and environmental benefits.

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+ 22

With the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping through the world's urban centers, governments worldwide are urging citizens to hunker down at home in a bid to quell the virus' spread. For apartment dwellers under quarantine, balconies have become the new platforms for entertainment and social interaction, making now an opportune moment in rethinking how we design and build these outdoor urban spaces.

As the new venues for social interactions, protests, and celebration, balconies have become more than just a place to to get fresh air and a brief respite from the confines of urban living. Nowadays, thanks to advancements in building technology, as well as a push for "greener" cities, urban gardens are becoming a fixture in cities' plans for bettering the lives of their residents; however, these plans present a new array of challenges such as structural support, maintenance, plant care, and the kinds of plants suitable for the urban environment. It's a challenge many developers are tackling with gusto, as they plan to make gardens the centerpiece of urban living spaces.

Here, we will look at 10 residential projects where gardens take center stage:

Year: 2012

Location: Turin, Italy

Year: 2014

Location: Milan, Italy

Year: 2017

Location: Jardim Paulista, Brazil

Year: 2017

Location: Mexico City, Mexico

Year: 2017

Location: Surry Hills, Australia

Year: 2018

Location: Palermo, Argentina

Year: 2018

Location: Mexico City, Mexico

Year: 2018

Location: Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam

Year: 2019

Location: Tulum, Mexico

Year: 2019

Location: Saavedra, Argentina

See even more residential projects or check our other articles, interviews, and news on landscaping, interior courtyards, and urban gardens.

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22 With the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping through the world's urban centers, governments worldwide are urging citizens to hunker down at home in a bid to quell the virus' spread. For apartment dwellers under quarantine, balconies have become the new platforms for entertainment and social interaction, making now an opportune moment in rethinking how we design and build these outdoor urban spaces.

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Harnessing Connections: The Rise of Social Commerce

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Harnessing Connections: The Rise of Social Commerce

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Social commerce is transforming the way consumers discover and purchase products by integrating social media platforms with e-commerce functionalities. This innovative approach leverages user-generated content, influencer marketing, and social interactions to create a seamless shopping experience. By fostering community engagement and building trust through authentic interactions, brands can tap into the power of social networks to drive sales and enhance customer loyalty. As social commerce continues to grow, it represents a significant shift in consumer behavior, merging entertainment with shopping in an increasingly digital world.

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The Rise of Social Commerce and What It Means for Indian Retailers - Indian Retailer

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The Indian retail landscape is undergoing a dynamic transformation, driven by the meteoric rise of social media and its increasing convergence with the world of commerce. - Indian Retailer

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The Evolving Acceptance of Divorce: A Path Toward Normalization

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The Evolving Acceptance of Divorce: A Path Toward Normalization

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Divorce, once considered a taboo, is gradually being normalized in many societies as a natural outcome of evolving personal and cultural values. This shift reflects changing attitudes towards marriage, individual autonomy, and personal well-being. As more people prioritize emotional health over societal expectations, divorce is increasingly seen as a step towards self-empowerment and new beginnings rather than failure. Understanding this cultural transition helps reshape our views on relationships and personal happiness.

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TikTok in the 2024 US Presidential Race: Trending Campaign Strategy or Passing Trend?The article explores the increasing use of TikTok by presidential candidates in the 2024 US election. 

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TikTok in the 2024 US Presidential Race: Trending Campaign Strategy or Passing Trend?The article explores the increasing use of TikTok by presidential candidates in the 2024 US election. 

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This topic is highly relevant as it highlights the evolving landscape of political campaigning in the digital age. The use of TikTok underscores the importance of social media in modern elections, especially in engaging younger voters who are less likely to consume traditional media.

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TikTok in the 2024 US Presidential Race: Trending Campaign Strategy or Passing Trend?

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A new tool to reach young voters has entered the race for the White House. A new tool to reach young voters has entered the race for the White House.

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AI-generated art and content are gaining popularity for their ability to quickly produce unique works, democratizing creativity for individuals and businesses. This technology is relevant today as it expands artistic possibilities, while growing awareness of originality and ownership issues prompts discussions about ethics and the evolving role of artists in creative industries.

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AI-generated art and content are gaining popularity for their ability to quickly produce unique works, democratizing creativity for individuals and businesses. This technology is relevant today as it expands artistic possibilities, while growing awareness of originality and ownership issues prompts discussions about ethics and the evolving role of artists in creative industries.

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Artificial intelligence can now make better art than most humans. Soon, these engines of wow will transform how we design just about everything.

Picture Lee Unkrich, one of Pixar's most distinguished animators, as a seventh grader. He's staring at an image of a train locomotive on the screen of his school's first computer. Wow, he thinks. Some of the magic wears off, however, when Lee learns that the image had not appeared simply by asking for "a picture of a train." Instead, it had to be painstakingly coded and rendered-by hard-working humans.

Now picture Lee 43 years later, stumbling onto DALL-E, an artificial intelligence that generates original works of art based on human-supplied prompts that can literally be as simple as "a picture of a train." As he types in words to create image after image, the wow is back. Only this time, it doesn't go away. "It feels like a miracle," he says. "When the results appeared, my breath was taken away and tears welled in my eyes. It's that magical."

Our machines have crossed a threshold. All our lives, we have been reassured that computers were incapable of being truly creative. Yet, suddenly, millions of people are now using a new breed of AIs to generate stunning, never-before-seen pictures. Most of these users are not, like Lee Unkrich, professional artists, and that's the point: They do not have to be. Not everyone can write, direct, and edit an Oscar winner like Toy Story 3 or Coco, but everyone can launch an AI image generator and type in an idea. What appears on the screen is astounding in its realism and depth of detail. Thus the universal response: Wow. On four services alone-Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Artbreeder, and DALL-E-humans working with AIs now cocreate more than 20 million images every day. With a paintbrush in hand, artificial intelligence has become an engine of wow.

Because these surprise-generating AIs have learned their art from billions of pictures made by humans, their output hovers around what we expect pictures to look like. But because they are an alien AI, fundamentally mysterious even to their creators, they restructure the new pictures in a way no human is likely to think of, filling in details most of us wouldn't have the artistry to imagine, let alone the skills to execute. They can also be instructed to generate more variations of something we like, in whatever style we want-in seconds. This, ultimately, is their most powerful advantage: They can make new things that are relatable and comprehensible but, at the same time, completely unexpected.

So unexpected are these new AI-generated images, in fact, that-in the silent awe immediately following the wow -another thought occurs to just about everyone who has encountered them: Human-made art must now be over. Who can compete with the speed, cheapness, scale, and, yes, wild creativity of these machines? Is art yet another human pursuit we must yield to robots? And the next obvious question: If computers can be creative, what else can they do that we were told they could not?

I have spent the past six months using AIs to create thousands of striking images, often losing a night's sleep in the unending quest to find just one more beauty hidden in the code. And after interviewing the creators, power users, and other early adopters of these generators, I can make a very clear prediction: Generative AI will alter how we design just about everything. Oh, and not a single human artist will lose their job because of this new technology.

It is no exaggeration to call images generated with the help of AI cocreations. The sobering secret of this new power is that the best applications of it are the result not of typing in a single prompt but of very long conversations between humans and machines. Progress for each image comes from many, many iterations, back-and-forths, detours, and hours, sometimes days, of teamwork-all on the back of years of advancements in machine learning.

AI image generators were born from the marriage of two separate technologies. One was a historical line of deep learning neural nets that could generate coherent realistic images, and the other was a natural language model that could serve as an interface to the image engine. The two were combined into a language-driven image generator. Researchers scraped the internet for all images that had adjacent text, such as captions, and used billions of these examples to connect visual forms to words, and words to forms. With this new combination, human users could enter a string of words-the prompt-that described the image they sought, and the prompt would generate an image based on those words.

Scientists now at Google invented the diffusion computational models that are at the core of image generators today, but the company has been so concerned about what people might do with them that it still has not opened its own experimental generators, Imagen and Parti, to the public. (Only employees can try them, and with tight guidelines on what can be requested.) It is no coincidence, then, that the three most popular platforms for image generators right now are three startups with no legacy to protect. Midjourney is a bootstrapping startup launched by David Holz, who based the generator in an emerging community of artists. The interface to the AI is a noisy Discord server; all the work and prompts were made public from the start. DALL-E is a second-gen product of the nonprofit OpenAI, funded by Elon Musk and others. Stable Diffusion appeared on the scene in August 2022, created by Emad Mostaque, a European entrepreneur. It's an open source project, with the added benefit that anyone can download its software and run it locally on their own desktop. More than the others, Stable Diffusion has unleashed AI image generators into the wild.

Why are so many people so excited to play with these AIs? Many images are being created for the same reason that humans have always made most art: because the images are pretty and we want to look at them. Like flames in a campfire, the light patterns are mesmerizing. They never repeat themselves; they surprise, again and again. They depict scenes no one has witnessed before or can even imagine, and they are expertly composed. It's a similar pleasure to exploring a video game world, or paging through an art book. There is a real beauty to their creativity, and we stare much in the way we might appreciate a great art show at a museum. In fact, viewing a parade of generated images is very much like visiting a personal museum-but in this case, the walls are full of art we ask for. And the perpetual novelty and surprise of the next image hardly wanes. Users may share the gems they discover, but my guess is that 99 percent of the 20 million images currently generated each day will only ever be viewed by a single human-their cocreator.

Like any art, the images can also be healing. People spend time making strange AI pictures for the same reason they might paint on Sundays, or scribble in a journal, or shoot a video. They use the media to work out something in their own lives, something that can't be said otherwise. I've seen images depicting what animal heaven might look like, created in response to the death of a beloved dog. Many images explore the representation of intangible, spiritual realms, presumably as a way to think about them. "A huge portion of the entire usage is basically art therapy," Holz, the Midjourney creator, tells me. "The images are not really aesthetically appealing in a universal sense but are appealing, in a very deep way, within the context of what's going on in people's lives." The machines can be used to generate fantasies of all types. While the hosted services prohibit porn and gore, anything goes on the desktop versions, as it might in Photoshop.

AI-generated pictures can be utilitarian too. Say you are presenting a report on the possibility of recycling hospital plastic waste into construction materials and you want an image of a house made out of test tubes. You could search stock photo markets for a usable image made by a human artist. But a unique assignment like this rarely yields a preexisting picture, and even if found, its copyright status could be dubious or expensive. It is cheaper, faster, and probably far more appropriate to generate a unique, personalized image for your report in a few minutes that you can then insert into your slides, newsletter, or blog-and the copyright ownership is yours (for now). I have been using these generators myself to cocreate images for my own slide presentations.

In an informal poll of power users, I found that only about 40 percent of their time is spent seeking utilitarian images. Most AI images are used in places where there were no images previously. They usually do not replace an image created by a human artist. They may be created, for example, to illustrate a text-only newsletter by someone without artistic talent themselves, or the time and budget to hire someone. Just as mechanical photography did not kill human illustrations a century ago, but rather significantly expanded the places in which images appeared, so too do AI image generators open up possibilities for more art, not less. We'll begin to see contextually generated images predominately in spaces that are currently blank, like emails, text messages, blogs, books, and social media.

This new art resides somewhere between painting and photography. It lives in a possibility space as large as painting and drawing-as huge as human imagination. But you move through the space like a photographer, hunting for discoveries. Tweaking your prompts, you may arrive at a spot no one has visited before, so you explore this area slowly, taking snapshots as you step through. The territory might be a subject, or a mood, or a style, and it might be worth returning to. The art is in the craft of finding a new area and setting yourself up there, exercising good taste and the keen eye of curation in what you capture. When photography first appeared, it seemed as if all the photographer had to do was push the button. Likewise, it seems that all a person has to do for a glorious AI image is push the button. In both cases, you get an image. But to get a great one-a truly artistic one-well, that's another matter.

Accessible AI image generators are not even a year old, but already it is evident that some people are much better at creating AI images than others. Although they're using the same programs, those who have accumulated thousands of hours with the algorithms can magically produce images that are many times better than the average person's. The images by these masters have a striking coherence and visual boldness that is normally overwhelmed by the flood of details the AIs tend to produce. That is because this is a team sport: The human artist and the machine artist are a duet. And it requires not just experience but also lots of hours and work to produce something useful. It is as if there is a slider bar on the AI: At one end is Maximum Surprise, and at the other end Maximum Obedience. It is very easy to get the AI to surprise you. (And that is often all we ask of it.) But it is very difficult to get the AI to obey you. As Mario Klingemann, who makes his living selling NFTs of his AI-generated artwork, says, "If you have a very specific image in mind, it always feels like you are up against a forcefield." Commands like "shade this area," "enhance this part," and "tone it down" are obeyed reluctantly. The AIs have to be persuaded.

Current versions of DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney limit prompts to about the length of a long tweet. Any longer and the words muddle together; the image turns to mush. That means that behind every fabulous image lies a short magic spell that summons it. It begins with the first incantation. How you say it matters. Your immediate results materialize in a grid of four to nine images. From that batch of pictures, you variate and mutate offspring images. Now you have a brood. If they look promising, begin to tweak the spell to nudge it in new directions as it births more generations of images. Multiply the group again and again as you search for the most compelling composition. Do not despair if it takes dozens of generations. Think like the AI; what does it like to hear? Whisper instructions that have worked in the past, and add them to the prompt. Repeat. Change the word order to see whether it likes that. Remember to be specific. Replicate until you have amassed a whole tribe of images that seem to have good bones and potential. Now cull out all but a select few. Be merciless. Begin outpainting the most promising images. That means asking the AI to extend the image out in certain directions beyond the current borders. Erase those portions that are not working. Suggest replacements to be done by the AI with more incantations (called inpainting). If the AI is not comprehending your hints, try spells used by others. When the AI has gone as far as it can, migrate the image to Photoshop for final tailoring. Present it as if you have done nothing, even though it is not uncommon for a distinctive image to require 50 steps.

Behind this new magecraft is the art of prompting. Each artist or designer develops a way of persuading an AI to yield its best by evolving their prompts. Let's call these new artists AI whisperers, or prompt artists, or promptors. The promptors work almost as directors, guiding the work of their alien collaborators toward a unified vision. The convoluted process required to tease a first-rate picture out of an AI is quickly emerging as a fine-art skill. Almost daily, new tools arrive to make prompting easier, better. PromptBase is a market for promptors to sell prompts that create simple images such as emoticons, logos, icons, avatars, and game weapons. It's like clip art, but instead of selling the art, they sell the prompt that generates the art. And unlike fixed clip art, it is easy to alter and tweak the art to fit your needs, and you can extract multiple versions again and again. Most of these prompts sell for a couple bucks, which is a fair price, given how much trouble it is to hone a prompt on your own.

Above-average prompts not only include the subject but also describe the lighting, the point of view, the emotion evoked, the color palette, the degree of abstraction, and perhaps a reference picture to imitate. As with other artistic skills, there are now courses and guidebooks to train the budding promptor in the finer points of prompting. One fan of DALL-E 2, Guy Parsons, put together a free Prompt Book, jammed with tips on how to go beyond the wow and get images you can actually use. One example: If your prompt includes specific terms such as "Sigma 75 mm camera lens," Parson says, then the AI doesn't just create that specific look made by the lens; "it more broadly alludes to 'the kind of photo where the lens appears in the description,'" which tends to be more professional and therefore yields higher-quality images. It's this kind of multilevel mastery that produces spectacular results.

For technical reasons, even if you repeat the exact same prompt, you are unlikely to get the same image. There is a randomly generated seed for each image, without which it is statistically impossible to replicate. Additionally, the same prompt given to different AI engines produces different images-Midjourney's are more painterly, while DALL-E is optimized for photographic realism. Still, not every promptor wishes to share their secrets. The natural reaction upon seeing a particularly brilliant image is to ask, "What spell did you use?" What was the prompt? Robyn Miller, cocreator of the legendary game Myst and a pioneering digital artist, has been posting an AI-generated image every day. "When people ask me what prompt I used," he says, "I have been surprised that I don't want to tell them. There is an art to this, and that has also surprised me." Klingemann is famous for not sharing his prompts. "I believe all images already exist," he says. "You don't make them, you find them. If you get somewhere by clever prompting, I do not see why I want to invite everybody else there."

It seems obvious to me that promptors are making true art. What is a consummate movie director-like Hitchcock, like Kurosawa-but a promptor of actors, actions, scenes, ideas? Good image-generator promptors are engaged in a similar craft, and it is no stretch for them to try and sell their creations in art galleries or enter them into art contests. This summer, Jason Allen won first place in the digital art category at the Colorado State Fair Fine Art competition for a large, space-opera-themed canvas that was signed "Jason Allen via Midjourney." It's a pretty cool picture that would've taken some effort to make no matter what tools were used. Usually images in the digital art category are created using Photoshop and Blender-type tools that enable the artist to dip into libraries of digitized objects, textures, and parts, which are then collaged together to form the scene. They are not drawn; these digital images are unapologetically technological assemblages. Collages are a venerable art form, and using AI to breed a collage is a natural evolution. If a 3D-rendered collage is art, then a Midjourney picture is art. As Allen told Vice, "I have been exploring a special prompt. I have created hundreds of images using it, and after many weeks of fine-tuning and curating my gens, I chose my top 3 and had them printed on canvas."

Of course, Allen's blue ribbon set off alarm bells. To some critics, this was a sign of the end times, the end of art, the end of human artists. Predictable lamentations ensued, with many pointing out how unfair it felt for struggling artists. The AIs are not only going to take over and kill us all-they are, apparently, going to make the world's best art while doing so.

At its birth, every new technology ignites a Tech Panic Cycle. There are seven phases:

1. Don't bother me with this nonsense. It will never work.

2. OK, it is happening, but it's dangerous, 'cause it doesn't work well.

3. Wait, it works too well. We need to hobble it. Do something!

4. This stuff is so powerful that it's not fair to those without access to it.

5. Now it's everywhere, and there is no way to escape it. Not fair.

6. I am going to give it up. For a month.

7. Let's focus on the real problem-which is the next current thing.

Today, in the case of AI image generators, an emerging band of very tech-savvy artists and photographers are working out of a Level 3 panic. In a reactive, third-person, hypothetical way, they fear other people (but never themselves) might lose their jobs. Getty Images, the premier agency selling stock photos and illustrations for design and editorial use, has already banned AI-generated images; certain artists who post their work on DeviantArt have demanded a similar ban. There are well-intentioned demands to identify AI art with a label and to segregate it from "real" art.

Beyond that, some artists want assurances that their own work not be used to train the AIs. But this is typical of Level 3 panic-in that it is, at best, misguided. The algorithms are exposed to 6 billion images with attendant text. If you are not an influential artist, removing your work makes zero difference. A generated picture will look exactly the same with or without your work in the training set. But even if you are an influential artist, removing your images still won't matter. Because your style has affected the work of others-the definition of influence-your influence will remain even if your images are removed. Imagine if we removed all of Van Gogh's pictures from the training set. The style of Van Gogh would still be embedded in the vast ocean of images created by those who have imitated or been influenced by him.

Styles are summoned via prompts, as in: "in the style of Van Gogh." Some unhappy artists would rather their names be censored and not permitted to be used as a prompt. So even if their influence can't be removed, you can't reach it because their name is off-limits. As we know from all previous attempts at censoring, these kinds of speech bans are easy to work around; you can misspell a name, or simply describe the style in words. I found, for example, that I could generate detailed black-and-white natural landscape photographs with majestic lighting and prominent foregrounds-without ever using Ansel Adams' name.

There is another motivation for an artist to remove themselves. They might fear that a big corporation will make money off of their work, and their contribution won't be compensated. But we don't compensate human artists for their influence on other human artists. Take David Hockney, one of the highest-paid living artists. Hockney often acknowledges the great influence other living artists have on his work. As a society, we don't expect him (or others) to write checks to his influences, even though he could. It's a stretch to think AIs should pay their influencers. The "tax" that successful artists pay for their success is their unpaid influence on the success of others.

What's more, lines of influence are famously blurred, ephemeral, and imprecise. We are all influenced by everything around us, to degrees we are not aware of and certainly can't quantify. When we write a memo or snap a picture with our phone, to what extent have we been influenced-directly or indirectly-by Ernest Hemingway or Dorothea Lange? It's impossible to unravel our influences when we create something. It is likewise impossible to unravel the strands of influence in the AI image universe. We could theoretically construct a system to pay money earned by the AI to artists in the training set, but we'd have to recognize that this credit would be made arbitrarily (unfairly) and that the actual compensatory amounts per artist in a pool of 6 billion shares would be so trivial as to be nonsensical.

In the coming years, the computational engine inside an AI image generator will continue to expand and improve until it becomes a central node in whatever we do visually. It will have literally seen everything and know all styles, and it will paint, imagine, and generate just about anything we need. It will become a visual search engine, and a visual encyclopedia with which to understand images, and the primary tool we use with our most important sense, our sight. Right now, every neural net algorithm running deep in the AIs relies on massive amounts of data-thus the billions of images needed to train it. But in the next decade, we'll have operational AI that relies on far fewer examples to learn, perhaps as few as 10,000. We'll teach even more powerful AI image generators how to paint by showing them thousands of carefully curated, highly selected images of existing art, and when this point comes, artists of all backgrounds will be fighting one another to be included in the training set. If an artist is in the main pool, their influence will be shared and felt by all, while those not included must overcome the primary obstacle for any artist: not piracy, but obscurity.

As soon as 2D generative algorithms were born, experimenters rushed to figure out what was next. Jensen Huang, the ambitious cofounder of Nvidia, believes the next generation of chips will generate 3D worlds for the metaverse-"the next computing platform," as he calls it. In a single week this past September, three novel text-to-3D/video image generators were announced: GET3D (Nvidia), Make-A-Video (Meta), and DreamFusion (Google). The expansion is happening faster than I can write. Amazing as frameable 2D pictures produced by AI are, outsourcing their creation is not going to radically change the world. We are already at peak 2D. The genuine superpower being released by AI image generators will be in producing 3D images and video.

A future prompt for a 3D engine might look something like this: "Create the messy bedroom of a teenager, with posters on the wall, an unmade bed, and afternoon sunlight streaming through closed blinds." And in seconds, a fully realized room is born, the closet door open and all the dirty clothes on the floor-in full 3D. Then, tell the AI: "Make a 1970s kitchen with refrigerator magnets and all the cereal boxes in the pantry. In full volumetric detail. One that you could walk through. Or that could be photographed in a video." Games crammed with alternatively rendered worlds and full-length movies decked out with costumes and sets have eternally been out of reach for individual artists, who remain under the power of large dollars. AI could make games, metaverses, and movies as quick to produce as novels, paintings, and songs. Pixar films in an instant! Once millions of amateurs are churning out billions of movies and endless metaverses at home, they will hatch entirely new media genres-virtual tourism, spatial memes-with their own native geniuses. And when big dollars and professionals are equipped with these new tools, we'll see masterpieces at a level of complexity never seen before.

But even the vast universes of 3D worlds and video are not vast enough to contain the disruption that AI image generators have initiated. DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are just the first versions of generative machines of all types. Their prime function, pattern recognition, is almost a reflex for human brains, something we accomplish without conscious thinking. It is at the core of almost everything we do. Our thinking is more complex than just pattern recognition, of course; dozens of cognitive functions animate our brain. But this single type of cognition, synthesized in machines (and the only cognition we have synthesized so far), has taken us further than we first thought-and will probably continue to advance further than we now think.

When an AI notices a pattern, it stores it in a compressed way. Round objects are placed in a "roundness" direction, red objects in another direction for "redness," and so on. Maybe it notices "treeness" and "foodness" too. It abstracts out billions of directions, or patterns. Upon reflection-or training-it notices that the overlap of these four qualities produces "appleness," yet another direction. Furthermore, it links all these noticed directions with word patterns, which can also share overlapping qualities. So when a human requests a picture of an apple via the word "apple," the AI paints an image with those four (or more) qualities. It is not assembling bits of existing pictures; rather, it is "imagining" a new picture with the appropriate qualities. It sort of remembers a picture that does not exist but could.

This same technique can be used-in fact, is already being used, in very early forms-to find new drugs. The AI is trained on a database of all the molecules we know to be active medicines, noticing patterns in their chemical structures. Then the AI is asked to "remember" or imagine molecules we have never thought of that seem to be similar to the molecules that work. Wonderfully, some of them actually do work, just as an AI image of a requested imaginary fruit can look remarkably like a fruit. This is the real transformation, and soon enough, the same technique will be used to help design automobiles, draft laws, write code, compose soundtracks, assemble worlds to entertain and instruct, and cocreate the stuff we do as work. We should take to heart the lessons we've learned so far from AI image generators because there will soon be more pattern-seeking AIs in all realms of life. The panic cycle we presently face is simply a good rehearsal for the coming shift.

What we know about AI generators so far is that they work best as partners. The nightmare of a rogue AI taking over is just not happening. That vision is fundamentally a misreading of history. In the past, technology has rarely directly displaced humans from work they wanted to do. For instance, the automatic generation of pictures by a machine-called a camera-was feared in the 1800s because it would surely put portrait painters out of business. But the historian Hans Rooseboom could find only a single portrait painter from that time who felt unemployed by photography. (Photography actually inspired a resurgence of painting later in that century.) Closer to our time, we might have expected professional occupations in photography to fall as the smartphone swallowed the world and everybody became a photographer-with 95 million uploads to Instagram a day and counting. Yet the number of photography professionals in the US has been slowly rising, from 160,000 in 2002 (before camera phones) to 230,000 in 2021.

Instead of fearing AI, we are better served thinking about what it teaches us. And the most important thing AI image generators teach us is this: Creativity is not some supernatural force. It is something that can be synthesized, amplified, and manipulated. It turns out that we didn't need to achieve intelligence in order to hatch creativity. Creativity is more elemental than we thought. It is independent of consciousness. We can generate creativity in something as dumb as a deep learning neural net. Massive data plus pattern recognition algorithms seems sufficient to engineer a process that will surprise and aid us without ceasing.

Scholars of creativity refer to something called Uppercase Creativity. Uppercase Creativity is the stunning, field-changing, world-altering rearrangement that a major breakthrough brings. Think special relativity, the discovery of DNA, or Picasso's Guernica. Uppercase Creativity goes beyond the merely new. It is special, and it is rare. It touches us humans in a profound way, far beyond what an alien AI can fathom.

To connect with a human deeply will always require a Creative human in the loop. This high creativity, however, should not be confused with the creativity that most human artists, designers, and inventors produce day to day. Mundane, ordinary, lowercase creativity is what we get with a great new logo design or a cool book cover, a nifty digital wearable or the latest must-have fashion, or the set design for our favorite sci-fi serial. Most human art, past and present, is lowercase. And lowercase creativity is exactly what the AI generators deliver.

But this is huge. For the first time in history, humans can conjure up everyday acts of creativity on demand, in real time, at scale, for cheap. Synthetic creativity is a commodity now. Ancient philosophers will turn in their graves, but it turns out that to make creativity-to generate something new-all you need is the right code. We can insert it into tiny devices that are presently inert, or we can apply creativity to large statistical models, or embed creativity in drug discovery routines. What else can we use synthetic creativity for? We may feel a little bit like medieval peasants who are being asked, "What would you do if you had the power of 250 horses at your fingertips?" We dunno. It's an extraordinary gift. What we do know is we now have easy engines of creativity, which we can aim into stale corners that have never seen novelty, innovation, or the wow of creative change. Against the background of everything that breaks down, this superpower can help us extend the wow indefinitely. Used properly, we can make a small dent in the universe.

This article appears in the February issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

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What AI-Generated Art Really Means for Human Creativity

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Artificial intelligence can now make better art than most humans. Soon, these engines of wow will transform how we design just about everything.

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Emotional AI is evolving with trends like multimodal emotion detection, real-time feedback, emotionally aware interfaces, engaging content creation, and personalized mental health support.

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Emotional AI is evolving with trends like multimodal emotion detection, real-time feedback, emotionally aware interfaces, engaging content creation, and personalized mental health support.

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1. Emotional AI interprets and responds to human emotions.

2. Multimodal emotion detection integrates voice, facial, and physiological signals.

3. Real-time emotional feedback adapts content based on user emotions.

4. Emotionally aware interfaces provide empathetic responses.

5. Personalized mental health support offers early detection and interventions.

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This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER - These trends reflect a larger societal shift toward self-care, emotional intelligence, and the use of technology as a bridge for personal development. The integration of emotional AI and resilience frameworks shows a desire to enhance mental well-being through proactive and tech-enabled approaches, suggesting that people are increasingly looking to control and manage their emotional health in more advanced, personalized ways.

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ABOUT THE CLUSTER - These trends reflect a larger societal shift toward self-care, emotional intelligence, and the use of technology as a bridge for personal development. The integration of emotional AI and resilience frameworks shows a desire to enhance mental well-being through proactive and tech-enabled approaches, suggesting that people are increasingly looking to control and manage their emotional health in more advanced, personalized ways.

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Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are no longer just for entertainment; they are becoming popular for “edutainment” (educational entertainment) content. Microlearning is on the rise, with creators offering bite-sized educational content on topics like finance, mental health, or cooking, gaining massive followings.

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Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are no longer just for entertainment; they are becoming popular for “edutainment” (educational entertainment) content. Microlearning is on the rise, with creators offering bite-sized educational content on topics like finance, mental health, or cooking, gaining massive followings.

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Social Media as an Educational Tool: Leveraging Platforms for Learning and Engagement

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Discover how social media transforms into a potent educational tool, fostering learning and enhancing engagement among users.

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Australia’s new ‘right to disconnect’ law lets employees ignore work-related calls and texts after hours, promoting work-life balance and reducing burnout.

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Australia’s new ‘right to disconnect’ law lets employees ignore work-related calls and texts after hours, promoting work-life balance and reducing burnout.

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1. New law in Australia: Employees can ignore work calls after hours ¹.

2. Right to disconnect: Protects employees from after-hours work communication ¹.

3. Global trend: Similar laws exist in France, Germany, and other countries ¹.

4. Employee well-being: Aims to improve work-life balance and mental health ¹.

5. Effective date: Law takes effect from August 26, 2024 ¹.

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A 'right to disconnect' law has been passed in Australia, which is aimed at protecting employees who refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact from their employers outside work hours. Similar laws giving employees a right to switch off their mobile devices are already in place in France, Germany and other countries in the European Union.

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New law in Australia allows employees to ignore calls, texts from bosses after work hours

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a right to disconnect law has been passed in australia which is aimed at protecting employees who refuse to monitor read or respond to contact from their employers outside work hours similar laws giving employees a right to switch off their mobile devices are already in place in france germany and other countries in the european union

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Skinimalism: Embrace the Power of Minimalist Skincare

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Skinimalism: Embrace the Power of Minimalist Skincare

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Skinimalism is a beauty trend that advocates for a simpler, more effective skincare routine by using fewer, multi-benefit products. This minimalist approach focuses on enhancing the skin's natural glow without the need for heavy layering of products. The benefits of skinimalism include saving time, reducing the risk of over-exfoliation or irritation, and encouraging healthier, balanced skin by using essential products that deliver multiple results​.

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Ever feel overwhelmed by 20-step skin care skincare routines? Non-stop product launches? Beauty trends you can't seem to keep up with? Enter Skinimalism. Skinimalism is exactly what it sounds like: minimalist skin care.

What is Skinimalism?

Skinimalism is the idea of approaching our skin care and makeup routines with a simpler approach. Stripping back the number of products we use on our bodies and faces each day paying attention to what products we are using, and making sure our skin is getting exactly what it needs to glow, bringing out the best of your natural beauty.

Why excessive routines are bad for your skin.

While companies and media may make it seem like the only way to have nice skin is to use a cabinet full of different masks, serums, creams, gels, and tools, using too much product can actually be doing your skin more harm than good.

Excessive skincare routines are actually destroying your skin. In an article with Vogue, facialist Debbie Thomas explains that "using too many products, trying new formulas each day, layering incorrectly or combining too many actives overwhelms, overstimulates and confuses the skin". By layering too many products, you end up with a compromised skin barrier, irritation, redness, and even acne. As a result, you see none of the benefits of the actives you put on your skin.

The benefits of Skinimalism.

Now, we have established why excessive beauty routines may not be the best for your skin. Let's take a look at the benefits of Skinimalism or minimalist skincare.

The first benefit of a stripped back beauty routine is a more full bank account. You do not need to purchasing tons of products or follow every skincare trend. By sticking with Skinimalism will end up saving a ton of money.

Skinimalism will also put you on the path to living a more sustainable lifestyle. By utilizing less products, you are helping out the environment by reducing your overall consumption.

Diving into benefits Skinimalism has on your actual skin. By scaling back on what you use each day, the ingredients will actually be set into your skin and do what they are supposed to do. This leads to less irritation, less redness, less acne and a better complexion

What do you need for a Skinimalist routine?

What are the products you actually need?

The three products you absolutely need: cleanser, moisturizer, and sunscreen. According to Sejal Shah, M.D., F.A.A.D., a board-certified dermatologist in New York City, once you have those three, that's when you add on products based on what your skin needs.

How address what your skin needs.

Once you stop paying attention to trends and start paying attention to your skin's concerns, that is when the real improvement will start to show. Dr. Idriss, another dermatologist, recommends to "focus first on the most problematic issue your skin presents, and then go after that".

When you take the time and address each issue one by one rather than trying to tackle them all at once, that is when your skin actually begins to transform, those issues start to go away, and your skin becomes much healthier.

Dr. Idriss also details in the InStyle interview what products and ingredients are best to look for when dealing with common skincare issues.

If you have...

Dry skin go for a moisturizer with colloidal oatmeal

Hyperpigmentation look into glycolic acid or hydroquinone serum

Crow's feet or loss of elasticity search for retinol

Acne look for products with benzoyl peroxide or salicylic acid

If you are still confused about what your skin really needs and the best products to address your skin concerns, consulting a dermatologist is the best way to go.

Decluttering your skincare routine

You do not need to purge your entire routine to be a Skinimalist. Simply start by using cleanser, moisturizer, and sunscreen everyday add-in products with the intention of targeting a skin concern. Skinimalism is all about focusing on the products, bettering your complexion and getting rid of the stress surrounding building out a skincare routine.

Minimalist makeup routines

The less is more approach can also extend from the medicine cabinet to the makeup bag. The number one thing to keep in mind when both putting together a minimalist skincare and makeup regimen is embracing your natural features.

Give your skin time to breathe and heal by scaling back on makeup products, you're giving your skin time to breathe and heal. By using minimal product to enhance your natural beauty instead of exaggerating or covering up, you will become comfortable in your own skin and learn to love yourself just the way you are.

For more on mastering minimalist makeup, check out our articles How to Declutter Your Beauty Regimen and No-Makeup Makeup Made Easier with These Celebrity-Loved Products.

Perfect skin

There is no such thing as perfect skin. Healthy skin has pores, spots, and scars. In today's world, filters, photoshop, and lighting are unfortunately becoming a norm for pictures and videos. Oftentimes we find ourselves comparing to things that are not real.

The idea of Skinimalism to let your natural skin shine through. Utilize as little products to make it look and feel the best. Extending beyond better skin and a freed up medicine cabinet, Skinimalism, just like minimalism, will save you money, time, and mind space.

Time to Skinimalize

So instead of stressing yourself out trying to keep up with the latest products, trends, and 20 step routines. Skinimalize to achieve the best skin and embrace your natural beauty for all of its perfections and imperfections.

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What is Skinimalism? The benefits of a minimalist skincare routine. - Minimalism

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Skinimalism is exactly what it sounds like: minimalist skin care. In this article we take you through why an excessive skincare routine can be bad for you and the benefits of scaling back and opting for a simple or skinimalist routine.

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SeymourPowell’s design of modular, secure rental stations for Brompton Bikes. These stations feature solar panels for self-sufficiency and can be expanded based on demand, enhancing urban mobility.

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SeymourPowell’s design of modular, secure rental stations for Brompton Bikes. These stations feature solar panels for self-sufficiency and can be expanded based on demand, enhancing urban mobility.

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Brompton Bikes wanted to create their own dedicated bikeshare system. Because their products fold down, this system would obviously be different from dock-based bikeshare programs.

The company hired industrial design consultancy SeymourPowell to figure it out.

"A modular secure locker for hire cycles that makes seamless city travel as easy as riding a bike."
?

"Brompton, famous maker of lightweight foldable and portable cycles, saw an opportunity to set up a network of unmanned but secure rental stations for its bikes," writes SeymourPowell. "We designed the easy-to-manufacture, high-security docking station and the UI which underpins the system."??

"The core concept consists of an 8-module dock which can be specified with a single solar panel. Additional pods of 4 docks can be added on, if and when demand increases. The solar panel means the units can be completely self-contained and easily installed without having to interfere with local services and utilities."

?"[The outcome is] a stand-alone design for maximum flexibility and efficiency, streamlining the user experience and maximising opportunities for branding and advertising."

Brompton Bike Hire has 70 stations spread across the UK, renting the bikes for £5 (USD $6.43) per day.

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Industrial Design Case Study: SeymourPowell Tackles Brompton Bike Rental Stations - Core77

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Brompton Bikes wanted to create their own dedicated bikeshare system. Because their products fold down, this system would obviously be different from dock-based bikeshare programs. The company hired industrial design consultancy SeymourPowell to figure it out. "A modular secure locker for hire cycles that makes seamless city travel as easy

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Plastic-free packaging is rising in popularity as consumers and brands embrace sustainability. With growing awareness of plastic pollution, eco-friendly alternatives like biodegradable and recyclable materials are favored. It's especially relevant as eco-conscious buyers seek brands that prioritize environmental responsibility.

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Plastic-free packaging is rising in popularity as consumers and brands embrace sustainability. With growing awareness of plastic pollution, eco-friendly alternatives like biodegradable and recyclable materials are favored. It's especially relevant as eco-conscious buyers seek brands that prioritize environmental responsibility.

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Brandweek is coming up soon, this September 23-26! With C-suite leaders from iconic brands keynoting sessions, leading workshops and attending networking events, it's the place to be for marketing innovation. Don't miss out-Register now.

Native, a direct-to-consumer personal care brand known for its simple, safe and effective ingredients just added another dimension to its portfolio: sustainable packaging.

Starting with its paper-based deodorant applicator, the brand has committed to offering every one of its soaps, deodorants and toothpastes in sustainable packages by 2023.

While there's certainly a trend toward more environmentally conscious packaging in the consumer packaged goods industry, Native said the impetus to shift to sustainability came from its consumers. In late 2018, customers started voicing concerns about plastic-free packaging to Native.

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Native Deodorant Now Comes in Plastic-Free Packaging

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The all-natural product is available online in paper-based applicators in 5 different scents.

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11 Key Hurdles to Achieving Women's Equality by 2030

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11 Key Hurdles to Achieving Women's Equality by 2030

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As the global push for gender equality intensifies, women continue to face significant challenges that impede progress. From economic disparities and inadequate access to education, to cultural biases and systemic violence, these eleven critical hurdles highlight the multifaceted nature of inequality. By understanding and addressing these barriers, we can pave the way for a more equitable future, empowering women and fostering inclusive societies by the year 2030. Join the conversation on how we can collectively overcome these obstacles and ensure equal rights and opportunities for all women.

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With just 27 per cent of parliamentary seats, 36 per cent of local government seats, and 28 per cent of management positions held by women, there is a lack of diverse perspectives in decision-making processes, hindering comprehensive policy formulation.
2. Poverty and lack of economic opportunities
More than 340 million women and girls are projected to live in extreme poverty by 2030. This represents a staggering 8 per cent of the global female population surviving on less than USD 2.15 a day. Social protections, access to decent work, and other support systems are urgently needed to provide a path out of poverty.
3. Workplace discrimination and inequalities
Only 61 per cent of prime working-age women participate in the labour force, compared to 91 per cent of prime working-age men. This affects both economic growth and societal progress. In 2019, for each dollar men earned in labour income, women earned only 51 cents.
4. An imbalance in unpaid care work
On the current trajectory, the gap between the time spent by women and men on unpaid care will narrow slightly, but by 2050, women globally will still be spending 9.5 per cent more time (2.3 more hours per day) on unpaid care work than men. This persistent gap limits women's participation in education, employment, and other opportunities.
5. Social norms and cultural practices
Harmful practices such as child marriage and female genital mutilation persist. Globally, one in five young women is married before age 18. The prevalence of child marriage highlights the need for attitudinal shifts and the promotion of legal frameworks that safeguard women and girls' rights.
6. Inadequate access to education and health care
An estimated 110 million girls and young women may remain out of school by 2030. Stalled progress in reducing maternal mortality and expanding educational opportunities call for targeted interventions to meet the 2030 goals.
7. Food insecurity
Nearly 24 per cent of women and girls are expected to experience moderate to severe food insecurity by 2030. Empowering women in food and agricultural systems by enhancing access to land and resources is vital for ensuring food security and economic growth.
8. Violence against women and girls
Each year, 245 million women and girls experience physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner. Older women also face higher rates of poverty and violence than older men.
9. Inadequate funding for gender equality initiatives
Only 4 per cent of total bilateral aid is allocated to gender equality and women's empowerment. The additional investment needed for achieving gender equality by 2030 is estimated at USD 360 billion per year.
10. Legal barriers and poorly enforced legislation
At least 28 countries do not have laws granting women equal rights to enter marriage and initiate divorce, and 67 countries lack laws prohibiting direct and indirect discrimination against women. Where legislation does exist to promote gender equality, effective implementation remains a challenge.
11. Lack of access to clean energy and sanitation
An estimated 341 million women and girls are projected to lack electricity by 2030. Universal access could significantly reduce poverty and improve women's health.

With just seven years remaining to achieve the 2030 targets, concerted efforts and funding are more necessary than ever. Each step forward, no matter how incremental, brings us closer to a future where gender equality is not just a goal, but a reality.

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The 11 biggest hurdles for women's equality by 2030 | UN Women - Headquarters

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There are only seven years left for the world to fulfil the promises made to girls and women in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and a new report highlights the biggest challenges remaining for global gender equality.

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key trends for 2024, focusing on emotional resilience and overcoming internal struggles in the workplace, emphasizing mental health, work-life balance, and adapting to new technologies.

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key trends for 2024, focusing on emotional resilience and overcoming internal struggles in the workplace, emphasizing mental health, work-life balance, and adapting to new technologies.

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In recent years, there has been a significant shift in society's attitude toward mental health challenges. The stigma surrounding these issues has gradually diminished, and conversations about mental well-being have become more open and accepted. This trend is not just a momentary fad but a profound societal transformation expected to continue and even accelerate into 2024.

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2024 Trends: Emotional Resilience and Overcoming Internal Struggles | Resilience First

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As we look ahead to 2024, several key trends and predictions emerge, offering hope and insight into navigating shifts to the workplace, and dealing with new technology. This article explores some of the most pressing employee struggles and discusses how the future may shape our ability to overcome them.

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The article highlights a 97% surge in searches for spiritual destinations in India, with Delhi scoring high in inquiries, reflecting a growing trend in spiritual travel.

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The article highlights a 97% surge in searches for spiritual destinations in India, with Delhi scoring high in inquiries, reflecting a growing trend in spiritual travel.

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Spiritual destinations are stealing the show in India's travel market with such locations recording a 97 percent surge in searches in the last two years, according to an analysis by online travel aggregator (OTA) MakeMyTrip.

Searches for Ayodhya grew 585 percent, Ujjain by 359 percent and Badrinath by 343 percent in 2023 over the previous year, said the report launched by the OTA on April 22.  Tier-2 and tier-3 cities are embracing spiritual journeys, it added.

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India travel trends: Search for spiritual destinations surges 97%, Delhi scores high in inquiries

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The appetite to travel has increased among Indians as people taking more than three trips per year has grown by 25 percent in 2023 as compared to 2019.

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hotels near DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai are charging up to ₹5 lakh for a three-night stay during Coldplay’s concert in January 20241. This surge in hotel prices is due to the high demand from fans attending the concert.

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hotels near DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai are charging up to ₹5 lakh for a three-night stay during Coldplay’s concert in January 20241. This surge in hotel prices is due to the high demand from fans attending the concert.

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It shows how a single event can drive up local prices and create a buzz in the city, affecting not just the concert-goers but also the hospitality industry and local economy.Also the premium ticket costs are few thousands only

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Mumbai: Hotels within 20 kilometres of the venue in Navi Mumbai where Coldplay is set to perform in January are charging up to ₹5 lakh for three nights, a price hike so steep that it surpasses even New Year's Eve rates.

Coldplay is scheduled to perform at DY Patil Stadium on January 18, 19 and 21. REUTERS/Steve Marcus(REUTERS)

Most hotels, including five-star properties, in the vicinity of DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai are now fully booked for January 18, 19 and 21, the dates Coldplay has set for their India tour, according to hotel aggregator apps.

For instance, Courtyard by Marriott near the venue and Taj Vivanta in Vashi, Navi Mumbai have no rooms available, as per MakeMyTrip.

Hotels are clearly aiming to capitalise on the overwhelming demand to attend Coldplay's live concerts. Tickets available on BookMyShow sold out within minutes, prompting Coldplay to announce a third show on January 21.

Fortune Select Exotica in Vashi, part of the ITC Hotel Group, is charging ₹2.45 lakh for one room for three people for three nights between 17 and 20 January. A few kilometres away from the venue in Turbhe, Fern Residency is charging almost ₹2 lakh for one room for two people for the three nights coinciding with the Coldplay shows. Regenza by Tunga, another hotel in Vashi, Navi Mumbai, is charging ₹4.45 lakh for three nights during the concert period, according to MakeMyTrip.

These hotels typically charge between ₹7,000 and ₹30,000 for a night for one room, as shown on hotel aggregator apps. Such high hotel rates are usually encountered during the year-end and a few days after. However, even those rates pale in comparison to what hotels are charging during Coldplay's performance dates in Mumbai.

For example, Taj Lands End in Bandra, Mumbai is listing a room for two at ₹34,000+ for a night on January 17. In contrast, the hotel is offering rooms at ₹32,000+ for one night on December 31, according to Agoda.

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Coldplay in Mumbai: Hotels near DY Patil stadium charge up to ₹5 lakh for 3 nights

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Most hotels, including five-star properties, in the vicinity of DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai are now fully booked for and 18, 19 and 21 January | Mumbai news

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The quality of parenting and the presence of supportive relationships play critical roles in mitigating negative effects. Understanding these dynamics is essential for fostering resilience and healthy adjustment in children navigating family structure changes.

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The quality of parenting and the presence of supportive relationships play critical roles in mitigating negative effects. Understanding these dynamics is essential for fostering resilience and healthy adjustment in children navigating family structure changes.

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Children may experience feelings of loss, confusion, or anxiety during transitions, which can influence their academic performance and social interactions.

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In the intersection of e-commerce and media, shoppable content allows viewers to purchase products directly from videos, TV shows, or digital articles. This trend, gaining traction with the rise of influencer marketing, blurs the lines between content and commerce, turning media into a seamless shopping experience.

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In the intersection of e-commerce and media, shoppable content allows viewers to purchase products directly from videos, TV shows, or digital articles. This trend, gaining traction with the rise of influencer marketing, blurs the lines between content and commerce, turning media into a seamless shopping experience.

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Shoppable content: Definition, platforms, and examples

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This article highlights the advancements in social commerce, including new platforms to add shoppable content to, like Twitter and TikTok.

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Remote work tensions escalate as leaders and employees struggle to agree, requiring balanced approaches and open discussions to address productivity and flexibility concerns

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Remote work tensions escalate as leaders and employees struggle to agree, requiring balanced approaches and open discussions to address productivity and flexibility concerns

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1. Polarization: Conflicting views on remote work are escalating ¹.

2. Power Balance: Neither side holds all the power in the debate ¹.

3. Resolution Difficulty: Finding mutually beneficial solutions is challenging ¹.

4. Leadership Role: Leaders must collaborate with employees for balance ¹.

5. Significant Change: Remote work is a major shift since the industrial revolution ¹.

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While conflicting perspectives on remote work are not new, the tension seems to be escalating. Neither side holds all the power, and as the conversation becomes more and more polarized, it becomes more difficult to reach a mutually beneficial resolution. Leaders must actively collaborate with their employees to find a balanced approach to one of the most significant changes to the way we work since the industrial revolution. First, the author discusses why it's so hard for leaders and employees to agree on remote work, then uses that knowledge to inform a few steps for leaders to help facilitate a frank and open discussion with employees - one that recognizes and validates the needs and concerns of both sides.

You don't have to look hard to find someone arguing passionately about the benefits or perils of remote work. Some people argue that leaders' productivity concerns are unfounded, while high-profile executives like Elon Musk suggest that anyone working from home is "phoning it in." The issue, variably framed in terms of returning to the office (RTO), hybridity, or flexibility, is no doubt polarizing. But the one consistent element of the arguments for and against is how strong and entrenched the stances are.

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While conflicting perspectives on remote work are not new, the tension seems to be escalating. Neither side holds all the power, and as the conversation becomes more and more polarized, it becomes more difficult to reach a mutually beneficial resolution.

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This article is interesting beacause it emphasis on how sustainable practices, like upcycling and mindful consumption, can alleviate both environmental and psychological stress. By adopting these practices, individuals can reduce their environmental footprint and foster a healthier relationship with fashion ¹.

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Fast fashion is a term used to describe clothing that transitions from the runway to the stores at a swift rate. Its production and disposal demand a high environmental cost since clothing production requires a considerable amount of environmental resources, fabric dyes can contain toxins that contaminate fresh water and with trends changing rapidly, waste generation is also extremely high. But what kind of impact does fast fashion leave on psychological health?

Consumer spending depends heavily on manipulative marketing techniques employed by advertisers. Advertisers rely on emotional content that is inspired by warmth, happiness, aspiration and hopefulness, and thus all of this gets associated with the brand. Consumers become influenced because many decisions made by humans are based on the foundation of emotion.

Think about the idea of retail therapy. With influencer marketing and social media marketing on the rise, consumers are bombarded with updates about new collections, sales, offers and more, consistently. It's overwhelming. Additionally, factors that influence the virality, shareability or even aspiration associated with the advertisement are also guided by the representation of the models, fit and style of the clothing and the emotion the advertisement is trying to sell. Beauty and fashion advertisements have the power to spark feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, shame, guilt and anxiety in consumers.
Read: In era of hyper-consumption and in midst of climate change crisis, fast fashion must address its failings
Society and media create limits for what is acceptable and what is not. Worth is decided on the basis of "you are too fat for this, you are too short for that, your legs look weird in this" and other such commonly used trial room talk. The standards shift quickly. Skinny jeans were in today, boyfriend jeans are the trend tomorrow; bermuda shorts have taken over on the day after that.

There is no keeping up with what is the 'right fit' for your body type and then enters 'anti fit'. There are 50 ways to hide your fat to look more like the model on the runway wearing the brand's clothes; then there are eight other bloggers who tell you how you need to dress for college by wearing "what's in" and what's not "so 2010". Body image concerns, health risks caused by disordered eating and body dysmorphia, financial distress, peer pressure and other psychological health concerns are heavily amplified by fast fashion.

The definitions of beauty, style and fashion are ever-evolving, and if you're not keeping up with it, you're falling behind. Manufacturers, retailers and designers will not only have their subjective standards, they will also tweak them from time to time. What was size 6 in Zara's Spring Summer collection could be size 8 for Autumn Winter. Also, what was size 10 in a GAP collection could be a size 6 in another brand's collection and thus influences buyer behaviour because of vanity sizing, where a consumer feels better about buying a smaller size. Clothing is a strong element of individual presentability. This encourages a culture that makes individuals feel like their self-worth is conditional to the size of their clothing. Additionally, problems with fitting can determine one's individual perception of one's body. To problematically remedy this, the fashion industry creates more apparel as 'solutions' - push up bras, shapewear, etc.

Additionally, while the fashion industry aims to target and exploit one end of society by encouraging high-spending behaviour, it demands the exploitation of another end of society with inhumane labour practices. Fast fashion brands benefit from cheap labour that they extract from low-income countries like India, Bangladesh and China. The modern slavery practices employed by fast fashion brands don't ensure a livable wage for the labourers working in the garment industry. They demand 14-16 hour work days for 7 days a week. During the peak season, they demand overtime that workers cannot refuse, take a sick day or even a bathroom break.

Many factories are also verbally and physically abusive with employees working in risky and unhealthy situations that involve poor ventilation, inhalation of toxic substances, injuries and risk for disease. The frequent use of child labour, forced labour and prohibition of worker unions are also oppressive ways in which fast fashion corporations benefit from the exploitation of labourers. These experiences are deeply traumatic. They increase the risk for anxiety, lowered self-worth, PTSD, difficulties with appetite, sleep and social relationship, stress-related diseases, somatic implications, repercussions of violence and an increased numbness and desensitisation that disallows marginalised communities from addressing the physical and psychological health concerns of working in these conditions. The accessibility to mental health resources is also extremely poor and coupled with deep stigmatisation, furthering more roadblocks to care.

Fast fashion is driving our planet to an environmental and health disaster. The industry's water consumption, carbon dioxide emission, textile waste, use of chemicals increases waste generation. The industry is snatching community resources, affecting marginalised communities severely and creating a long-term impact on the psychological health of consumers, labourers and communities directly impacted by the caused environmental distress.
Also read: Indian artists design comic strips to raise awareness about water consumption in the fashion industry
An emphasis on sustainability, upcycling, thrift store shopping has increased. These measures are useful not only in reducing the generation of waste but also in building community, encouraging discourse about the detrimental effects of the fast fashion industry, giving creators their true credit and improving accessibility to fashion that isn't determined purely by trends. Buyers are educating themselves better and talking to business owners directly instead of corporations. The process is starting to become more collaborative where the consumers are providing feedback, learning more about the history and skill that went into making a piece and feeling proud of themselves for ensuring that their money went to the right cause. This reinforces a positive cycle for sustainability and also assists in increasing feelings of self-worth and community work. The absence of manipulative marketing, transparency and accountability on social media, access to information from the right sources and other factors help to make this happen.
- Ruchita Chandrashekar is a behavioural health researcher and a psychologist

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Fast fashion's mental health impact: How sustainability, upcycling can help reduce environmental, psychological stress

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While the fashion industry aims to target and exploit one end of society by encouraging high-spending behaviour, it demands the exploitation of another end of society with inhumane labour practices.

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The Future is Bright: Embracing the Promise of Biotechnology

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The Future is Bright: Embracing the Promise of Biotechnology

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From groundbreaking medical advancements and sustainable agricultural practices to innovative environmental solutions, biotechnology harnesses the power of living systems to address some of humanity's most pressing challenges. With its potential to enhance healthcare, improve food security, and combat climate change, the future is indeed bright for those who dare to dream and innovate in the realm of biotechnology.

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The future is bright, the future is biotechnology

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As PLOS Biology celebrates its 20th anniversary, our April issue focuses on biotechnology with articles covering different aspects of the field, from genome editing to synthetic biology.

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Navigating the New Relationship Trend: The Rise of Situationships

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Navigating the New Relationship Trend: The Rise of Situationships

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In today's fast-paced world, the concept of "situationships" has emerged as a popular trend in modern dating. Blurring the lines between casual flings and committed relationships, a situationship is an undefined romantic connection without the labels. While it offers freedom and flexibility, it also brings challenges such as ambiguity, emotional uncertainty, and unmet expectations. As more people embrace this fluid relationship style, understanding its dynamics has become crucial in navigating personal boundaries and communication in modern romance.

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How the Hallyu wave is boosting Korean language learning in India, inspiring students through K-pop and K-dramas, and increasing cultural exchange between the two countries.

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How the Hallyu wave is boosting Korean language learning in India, inspiring students through K-pop and K-dramas, and increasing cultural exchange between the two countries.

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K-Craze in India: How the Hallyu Wave is Shaking up Language Learning and Inspiring Indian Students

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Anoushka Nag Author is an Undergraduate Student, School of Language Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. This article was an outcome of the ’Korea Centre Su…

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The article outlines five jobs AI will create, such as AI engineers, and five roles it will change, emphasizing the evolving job market due to AI advancements.

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The article outlines five jobs AI will create, such as AI engineers, and five roles it will change, emphasizing the evolving job market due to AI advancements.

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five up-and-coming AI jobs to consider.

AI engineer or specialist

AI ethicist

AI protection analyst or responsible use architect

AI solutions analyst

Head of AI

other side of the coin

Bank tellers and travel agents

Customer service representatives

Data entry professionals

Translators

Writers and marketers

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When gold was discovered in California in 1848, more than 300,000 people moved west, one of the largest mass migrations in US history.

Those miners of the 19th century have little in common with the workers of today, except, perhaps, for a desire to follow opportunity - and get rich quick along the way.

If you're wondering whether today's AI boom is the right time to pull up stakes and start a new career, you're in good company. From December 2022 to September 2023, applications to AI jobs in the US were up 19% on jobs site LinkedIn while listings that mention AI have seen a 17% increase in applications in the last two years.

AI is driving increased demand for software developers in particular, a field that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects will see 25% growth from 2022 to 2032, which it says is "much faster than the average for all occupations."

As for the jobs that are most vulnerable to AI, they're most likely to be those that are "already showing some signs of decreasing demand" because of slower economic growth and a decrease in incoming workers, according to a July report from the White House's Council of Economic Advisers. The CEA also said it sees little evidence that AI will be a drag on overall employment.

It's a safe bet roles that like software developer and software engineer will remain in demand as the AI boom continues - these are the people building this data-processing software. But you're not necessarily left out if you don't have a degree in computer science.

Less than two years after the first generative AI tools debuted - starting with OpenAI's ChatGPT - and wowed us with their ability to create new content almost instantly based on massive amounts of data, research shows more than half of Americans have used them in some capacity. Meanwhile, we're seeing tech companies like Adobe, Amazon and Anthropic promote enterprise-specific tools to encourage adoption at the office.

A report in May from consulting firm McKinsey found 65% of respondents say their organizations regularly use gen AI, more than double what it was a year earlier. As a result, McKinsey dubbed 2024 "the year organizations truly began using - and deriving business value from - this new technology."

And in order to do so, they need to bring on employees in new roles.

"This is not new," said Karin Kimbrough, chief economist at LinkedIn. "Every time there's a technological innovation, there are new jobs that are created where people need to manage it, repair it, figure out how it works and train others."

Here's a closer look at five up-and-coming AI jobs to consider:

AI engineer or specialist

This is someone who has been trained to build AI models and applications. You can think of an AI engineer or specialist as working within a specific niche of software engineering that is focused on building intelligent systems.

AI specialist is a popular listing on jobs site ZipRecruiter as companies seek employees with hands-on experience in writing algorithms and using APIs to develop new applications with technology from AI companies like OpenAI or Anthropic, said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter.

AI ethicist

An AI ethicist is someone who dives into the ways AI is used. They consider AI's legal, moral and social implications to implement guidelines for AI's development and use in an organization, as well as its potential impact on the outside world.

For example, they might assess a company's resume screening and candidate ranking algorithms for signs of bias and suggest ways to improve, like incorporating new training data.

AI protection analyst or responsible use architect

This individual is responsible for protecting a company's IP and preventing abuse or fraud. They must also ensure any AI products developed by the company are operating as intended and within responsible use guidelines. This could include ensuring an AI tool from a financial company, which offers personalized advice based on sensitive data, is maintaining privacy and security.

They might also be responsible for compliance with regulations like the California Consumer Privacy Act, which requires companies to provide notices explaining their privacy practices and to respond to consumer requests regarding their personal information.

AI solutions analyst

An AI solutions analyst helps organizations implement AI to work more efficiently across a range of industries, sort of like a traditional business consultant. You can also think of this person as an AI whisperer.

"Many employers understand this is a powerful new tool and they want to figure out a way to harness it and see if their business could become cheaper, quicker, more efficient and more personalized using AI, but they have no idea [how]," Pollak said.

Head of AI

New leadership roles are also emerging, which include titles like "head of AI" or "chief AI officer." This is someone who oversees the development and deployment of AI at a company. They will typically manage a team composed of engineers and the titles listed above.

The other side of the coin

While job experts agree many roles will be created or expanded to deal with AI, they stop short of predicting the full-on elimination of any current jobs. That's even as businesses tap into AI for repeatable, computer-based tasks previously performed by human employees in departments like marketing, sales, product development, customer care and back-office support.

"We don't think jobs are going to go away," Kimbrough said. "We just think people are going to do certain tasks less and rely on this technology to do it more for them."

These five job categories are projected to see the most impact:

Bank tellers and travel agents

These roles are perhaps the best example of jobs that have already changed as a result of technology - think ATMs, online banking and e-commerce - and they will continue to shift toward providing more of a human touch.

"They're still around - they're just very bespoke," Kimbrough said of travel agents. "They do personalized trips for you. But they didn't go away and neither did bank tellers."

Customer service representatives

Another role that has already changed is customer service rep. Website chatbots have long been able to answer basic FAQs and connect customers to human employees for more advanced queries. This trend is likely to continue and, like bank tellers and travel agents, customer service roles will evolve to include more personalized interactions, experts say.

Data entry professionals

Data entry has never been known as a particularly fulfilling job field, which makes it a good match for AI. The repetitive nature of pulling data from documents or spreadsheets doesn't bore AI at all - and it can process a lot more data a lot faster than you or I.

The US Department of Labor projects data entry keyers will see a 26% drop in employment from 2022 to 2032. Expect AI to make significant inroads here.

Translators

Given the capacity for chatbots to translate languages - OpenAI's ChatGPT speaks more than 50 while Google's Gemini knows 40 - Nick Bunker, director of economic research at job site Indeed, forecasts at least a decline in demand for human translators in the future. However, AI can't do things like in-the-field translations after games with professional athletes, so it's another position that may shift to focus more heavily on moments with human interaction.

Writers and marketers

This one hurts.

Pollak pointed to multiple reports about jobs threatened by AI, which usually include writing roles in a range of industries from accounting and economics to HR, law and making movies and TV shows, as businesses start using AI to create content instead.

"Many of the fields that are seen as being at major risk are very popular with students and job seekers - fields like communications and marketing," Pollak said. "And so there may be a period when there is a substantial mismatch between the skills that people have and the skills the market needs."

What we don't know

And there are likely changes to come we can't even fathom yet.

Consider another quick history lesson, this time in the fashion field.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, people typically had two outfits - one for work and one for church. However, following the advent of industrial spinning and fabric making after the Civil War, clothing started to become about more than just staying warm. It became more common for individuals to have closets full of clothes, which led to variety, which spurred style and creativity, which helped develop fields like design, advertising, modeling and magazine publishing.

"The same thing will likely be true for AI," Pollak said. "It'll create new avenues for creativity and expression and change the nature of a whole wide range of goods and services around us in ways that we can't possibly predict."

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Here Are 5 Jobs AI Will Create - and 5 Roles AI Will Change

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Employment opportunities are emerging beyond software development.

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The Rise of Knotless Braids: A Revolution in Protective Styling

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The Rise of Knotless Braids: A Revolution in Protective Styling

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Knotless braids have quickly become one of the most popular hairstyles in 2024, offering a sleeker, more comfortable alternative to traditional braids. This technique begins with your natural hair, gradually feeding in extensions to create a seamless, natural-looking braid that reduces scalp tension. Known for being less painful and promoting hair growth, knotless braids have taken over as a go-to protective style, celebrated for their versatility, longevity, and minimal maintenance, making them a favorite for those seeking both beauty and comfort.

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The Rise of Knotless Braids (Published 2022)

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A new style has driven up demand at salons in Harlem and Brooklyn.

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Could a "wellbeing wardrobe" help?Highlights the concept of a “wellbeing wardrobe,” which emphasizes reducing consumption, buying durable clothing, and recycling

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Could a "wellbeing wardrobe" help?Highlights the concept of a “wellbeing wardrobe,” which emphasizes reducing consumption, buying durable clothing, and recycling

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This topic is particularly relevant today as the fashion industry is a significant contributor to global carbon emissions and waste. With increasing awareness of climate change and sustainability, finding solutions to make fashion more sustainable is crucial for reducing our environmental footprint and promoting ethical practices in the industry

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Samantha Sharpe, Monique Retamal and Taylor Brydges

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People are buying more clothing than ever before in some countries, but it’s not sustainable. Could a “wellbeing wardrobe” help?

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30-year-old woman collapses at work, dies after manager denies her sick leave request” reports a tragic incident where a woman in Thailand, identified as May, died after her manager refused her request for sick leave. Despite being diagnosed with an inflamed large intestine and having a medical certificate, she was forced to return to work, leading to her collapse and subsequent death from necrotising enterocolitis

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30-year-old woman collapses at work, dies after manager denies her sick leave request” reports a tragic incident where a woman in Thailand, identified as May, died after her manager refused her request for sick leave. Despite being diagnosed with an inflamed large intestine and having a medical certificate, she was forced to return to work, leading to her collapse and subsequent death from necrotising enterocolitis

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In today’s context, this incident underscores the critical importance of workplace health and safety, and the need for compassionate management practices. It highlights ongoing global discussions about work-life balance, employee rights, and the potentially fatal consequences of neglecting employee well-being ¹ ². This case serves as a stark reminder of the human cost of inadequate workplace policies and the urgent need for reforms to protect workers’ health and lives ¹ ².

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30-year-old woman collapses at work, dies after manager denies her sick leave request

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A 30-year-old factory worker collapsed and died a day after her manager refused her sick leave request.

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Intimate Weddings: A Celebration of Love in Personalized, Meaningful Gatherings

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Intimate Weddings: A Celebration of Love in Personalized, Meaningful Gatherings

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Intimate weddings focus on creating close-knit, heartfelt celebrations with fewer guests, allowing couples to prioritize meaningful connections and personal details. These smaller-scale events emphasize quality over quantity, providing an opportunity for bespoke experiences, unique décor, and customized elements that reflect the couple's love story. With an emphasis on simplicity, elegance, and emotional warmth, intimate weddings offer a refreshing, stress-free alternative to grand affairs.

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www.trulyengaging.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.

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“Retirement’s a Struggle? Get a Boommate!” explores how rising apartment rents and inadequate retirement income are driving baby boomers to seek roommates. This trend is particularly prevalent among widowed or divorced individuals with spare bedrooms.

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“Retirement’s a Struggle? Get a Boommate!” explores how rising apartment rents and inadequate retirement income are driving baby boomers to seek roommates. This trend is particularly prevalent among widowed or divorced individuals with spare bedrooms.

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1. Economic Pressure: Soaring rents and insufficient retirement savings are pushing retirees to find affordable living solutions ¹.

2. Companionship: Beyond financial relief, having a roommate can provide emotional support and companionship ¹.

3. Trend Growth: The number of boomers seeking roommates has significantly increased, reflecting broader economic and social shifts ¹.

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Retirement’s a Struggle? Get a Boommate!

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Synthetic biology for food and material production is gaining popularity due to its potential to create sustainable alternatives to traditional methods. It’s relevant today as it addresses issues like food security and climate change. As awareness of environmental impacts grows, synthetic biology offers innovative, eco-friendly solutions, making it an appealing option for the future.

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Synthetic biology for food and material production is gaining popularity due to its potential to create sustainable alternatives to traditional methods. It’s relevant today as it addresses issues like food security and climate change. As awareness of environmental impacts grows, synthetic biology offers innovative, eco-friendly solutions, making it an appealing option for the future.

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Synthetic Biology Is Getting Closer to Industrial Scale

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As a coming generation of large biomanufacturing facilities slashes costs, sustainable materials made from organisms based on nature’s design principles are poised to go mainstream.

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8 Veg Substitute Dishes For The Most Popular Non-Veg Delicacies-September, 2023 | magicpin blog

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All the vegetarian’s out there, don’t be jealous of your non-vegetarian friends. Say yes to these 8 yummy veg substitute dishes for the most popular non-veg delicacies.

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Revolutionizing Tomorrow: The Intersection of Innovation, Technology, and Creativity

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Revolutionizing Tomorrow: The Intersection of Innovation, Technology, and Creativity

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In today’s fast-paced world, innovation and technology drive transformative changes across industries, reshaping the way we live, work, and create. From artificial intelligence to sustainable design, the fusion of cutting-edge technology and creative problem-solving fuels breakthroughs that push boundaries and redefine possibilities. This dynamic intersection fosters advancements that enhance efficiency, improve user experiences, and create more connected, intelligent systems that elevate human potential.

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BBC Innovation | Technology, Health, Environment, AI

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BBC Innovation brings you the latest in Technology news and coverage from around the world, including health, environment, AI, and more

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The growing trend of promoting certain foods as highly nutritious and beneficial for health due to their dense concentration of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.

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The growing trend of promoting certain foods as highly nutritious and beneficial for health due to their dense concentration of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.

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This trend is driven by health-conscious consumers seeking natural ways to improve well-being, although critics argue that it can sometimes lead to overhyped claims and marketing gimmicks.

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Decoding Kombucha - India’s Latest Superfood Obsession

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I’ll take the occasional CrossFit class, try my hand at making a smoothie bowl or even commit to a meal prep, but I’ve never pledged complete allegiance to a su

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discusses how integrating art into public spaces can enhance community engagement, foster social connections, and address social issues through creative placemaking.

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discusses how integrating art into public spaces can enhance community engagement, foster social connections, and address social issues through creative placemaking.

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FROM PAPER TO 'THE PAPERS'

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You don't need to look far to see the impact of art in public spaces. Art can connect us to place and record history as it unfolds.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, stories on the importance of public art are being told globally. And this isn't new. Times of crisis have often inspired some of the most influential artistic movements.

Displaying visual symbols of resistance publicly, like the face of George Floyd, can connect social movements across the world. And in Canada, the display of statues like Egerton Ryerson have been deemed unacceptable as we reckon with our ongoing colonial history.

Public art can be defined as art that is available to the general public outside of museums and galleries; publicly funded; and related to the interests or concerns of, and used by a public community.

Public art is referred to by some as creative placemaking: a process of artistic creation and collaboration that helps to shape the surrounding built, natural and social environments.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

For French philosopher Jacques Rancière, art is disruptive. Done right, he says, it can make the spectator rethink their understanding of politics and society by calling to attention previously hidden inequalities.

For many, the power of public art rests in its ability to turn artistic practice into a social practice. It challenges the viewer to confront social issues that affect the very place they stand.

Art in times of crisis

COVID-19 is just one example of a period of shared adversity when our connection to the arts has flourished. The Dadaists' commentary on the 1918 flu reflected an intense and collectively frustrated desire for meaning in a world filled with chaos.

During the Great Depression, the arts became increasingly experimental. In the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal saw the largest public art funding initiative the country had seen. A few decades later, in the 1980s, provinces and municipalities in Canada followed suit and began significantly investing in public art.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Protest music during the civil rights movement and Vietnam War expressed anger, despair and hope. Gay artists and writers during the AIDS crisis memorialized a collective grief that was being either ignored or vilified. The art from both eras came at an immense cost, and has been profoundly culturally and socially influential.

Today, the pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated inequalities that were already present.

Read more: Coronavirus discriminates against Black lives through surveillance, policing and the absence of health data

But there has also been engagement and social solidarity: from Black Lives Matter, to the Indigenous Land Back movement and support for unhoused people.

Those who have the privilege not to pay attention are finding this option less viable. This engagement arguably comes with its own set of problems, but it is a momentum that can be built upon to imagine and do the work needed to create better futures for society.

Artists are well positioned to do this creative imagining.

Art beyond the gallery

As we each search for meaning throughout our intensely local and geographically limited lives during the pandemic, public art finds, creates and shares the beauty, joy and solidarity that can be found in public spaces.

Galleries are often isolated from the communities in geographical proximity. They have often been places of exclusion, and have historically served to uphold a dominant, European settler-centred narrative. They have played a role in perpetuating colonial and racist attitudes towards Indigenous communities, their art and histories.

Indigenous artists have long been challenging these narratives. Mainstream art is catching on, and there has been an unprecedented level of Indigenous representation and leadership within gallery spaces in recent decades.

(Unsplash/Diogo Fagundes)

This leadership should shape public art in Canada. Public spaces, like art galleries, have also privileged some more than others. Bringing art outside of the gallery space is not a catch-all solution. What matters more is how it's done.

Toronto's year of public art

In Toronto, the municipal government has announced that its " Year of Public Art " will begin in the fall with a total budget of $4.5 million in 2021. This is the inauguration of a 10-year public art plan. It responds to calls for an improved public art strategy, with a greater commitment to equity in the location of installations, the level of engagement with communities and the artists who create works.

Toronto has promised a strong commitment to Indigenous self-determination, leadership and placemaking within its public art strategy.

The city's public art installations have increased in the past 50 years, with over 700 installations added between 1967 and 2015.

Toronto's Percent for Public Art program, a commonly used strategy in cities in North America and Europe, encourages developers to donate one per cent of their gross construction costs towards public art in their development's direct vicinity.

The program is voluntary though. And because most development is happening in the downtown core, this is where public art has been concentrated, meaning neighbourhoods with less development have received less investment in public art.

Nonetheless, the city is home to a multiplicity of adept communities and talented artists who continue to use public art to build community capacity and foster social inclusion.

Listening to artists of diverse backgrounds and elevating communities to participate meaningfully will support important conversations that determine our collective future. And that makes the investment in public art worthwhile for us all.

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Bringing art into public spaces can improve the social fabric of a city

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You don't need to look far to see the impact of art in public spaces. Art can connect us to place and record history as it unfolds. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, stories on the importance of public art are being told globally. And this isn't new.

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True crime podcasts are gaining popularity for their gripping storytelling and exploration of real-life mysteries. They are relevant today as more people seek engaging content that dives into human psychology and justice. As awareness of criminal cases and social issues grows, listeners are becoming more conscious of true crime's ability to inform, entertain, and spark discussions around justice and morality.

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True crime podcasts are gaining popularity for their gripping storytelling and exploration of real-life mysteries. They are relevant today as more people seek engaging content that dives into human psychology and justice. As awareness of criminal cases and social issues grows, listeners are becoming more conscious of true crime's ability to inform, entertain, and spark discussions around justice and morality.

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How do true crime podcasts impact public interest in criminal cases?

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The true crime genre is more popular than ever. But with so many people consuming true crime content, how does this trend affect actual criminal investigations and ongoing court cases?

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ASMR content is gaining popularity for its calming effects, helping people relax, reduce stress, and improve sleep. It's relevant today as more individuals seek mental health support and ways to unwind in a fast-paced world. As awareness of self-care and wellness grows, people are becoming conscious of ASMR's ability to provide soothing, sensory experiences, contributing to its widespread appeal.

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ASMR content is gaining popularity for its calming effects, helping people relax, reduce stress, and improve sleep. It's relevant today as more individuals seek mental health support and ways to unwind in a fast-paced world. As awareness of self-care and wellness grows, people are becoming conscious of ASMR's ability to provide soothing, sensory experiences, contributing to its widespread appeal.

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Allison Mooney Head of Trends and Insights, Marketing at Google

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ASMR videos: The biggest YouTube trend you’ve never heard of - Think with Google

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Sound-oriented ‘ASMR’ videos are resonating with millions of YouTube users. Learn how some brands are raising their profiles by lowering the volume.

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 The Rise of Eco-Literature: Exploring Nature and Environmental Themes in Modern Writing

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 The Rise of Eco-Literature: Exploring Nature and Environmental Themes in Modern Writing

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Eco-literature, a genre that intertwines nature and environmental concerns with storytelling, is gaining prominence in today's literary world. This movement reflects society’s growing awareness of environmental issues, with writers using their narratives to explore the relationship between humans and the natural world, climate change, sustainability, and ecological preservation. From fiction to poetry, eco-literature inspires readers to reflect on their impact on the environment, fostering a deeper connection to nature and a sense of responsibility towards its preservation.

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The Rise of Eco-Literature: Nature and Environmental Themes in Writing

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Eco-literature, also known as environmental literature or ecocriticism, has emerged as a crucial genre in contemporary literature…

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45. Adult coloring books are gaining popularity as a stress-relief and mindfulness tool, helping people relax and focus. They’re relevant today due to increasing awareness of mental health and the need for creative outlets. As more people become conscious of self-care, these books offer a simple, accessible way to unwind and improve well-being.

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45. Adult coloring books are gaining popularity as a stress-relief and mindfulness tool, helping people relax and focus. They’re relevant today due to increasing awareness of mental health and the need for creative outlets. As more people become conscious of self-care, these books offer a simple, accessible way to unwind and improve well-being.

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I get it now.

I have never changed my mind about anything as quickly or completely as I changed my mind about adult coloring books. I found the trend mostly baffling and maybe a little dumb. But I saw some in a bookstore the other day and I immediately said to my friend, "Well, I'm not leaving here without one of these."

And indeed, reader, I did not.

Let me clarify: When I say "adult coloring book," I'm referring to a specific subset thereof. I don't mean the Benedict-Cumberbatch-is-your-boyfriend coloring books or novelty coloring books based on beloved TV shows. These are silly and whimsical, and-while I am all for silly and whimsical, let's just be clear about that-they don't seem like they would actually be that fun to color? I mean, even if you make Barnabus Crumplecake into an alien and color his skin with polka dots or whatever, you're still just filling in a big human head over and over. (I'm sorry, Benny, I like you and your big head. Really.)

No, I am only interested in patterns. Like these ones. Or these ones. These ones in the shapes of animals are acceptable only because the animals are made of patterns.

Several trend pieces about adult coloring books lump them in with other "childish" activities that grown-ups are apparently engaging in to regress back to their simpler youth, like adult preschool and adult summer camp. But I think they fit better into the trend of meditation and mindfulness that's been going for some time now, one response among many to the high levels of stress many adults are living with.

Another page from the author's coloring
book (Julie Beck / The Atlantic)

In the admittedly brief time that I have had this coloring book, it has filled a particular activity niche for me, which is "something to do with my hands while I watch Netflix." Other activities in this niche include: knitting, painting my nails, texting, putting candy in my mouth. End of list.

Why do I need to do two things at once? Why can't I just sit quietly and enjoy a TV show? In part, it's because I feel a little less lazy if I'm making something while I wile away the hours with Friday Night Lights. But also, I'm watching TV in the first place to relax, to quiet my mind, and often my mind is loud enough that it shouts over Coach Taylor. I really do think that a lifetime of multitasking has left me occasionally incapable of subduing the entirety of my mind with one activity. If the front of my mind is occupied by the show, and the back is focused on picking colors and staying in the lines, there's not room for much else. It's a sort of mindfulness that's more like mind-fullness.

There are plenty of studies on the effectiveness of art therapy in reducing stress, and coloring seems to offer some similar benefits, as William Brennan wrote in this magazine when he noted the coloring books' particular popularity in France. And doodling is a way for people to organize their thoughts, and focus.

Coloring offers that relief and mindfulness without the paralysis that a blank page can cause. It's easier in the way that ordering from a restaurant with a small menu is easier than deciding what you want at Denny's, where you could eat almost anything. This is the paradox of choice, and it's been well-studied-too many options is overwhelming. But with coloring, you know what you're working with. You just choose how to fill it in. I think this is why coloring as a soothing activity feels so similar to painting my nails. I can get intricate with my tiny nail art brushes, but I still have a limited canvas, maybe a square centimeter or so, and I have the colors of polish that I have.

So the polish and the coloring both involve repetitive motion and limited space in which to work, creating a locus point around which thoughts can revolve. And here's where the patterns are important (have I mentioned I like the patterns?), because I think there's a comfort in the concentration detail demands, something that coloring in the vast expanse of Butterbeer Cornichon's head doesn't offer.
There's something satisfying about seeing your thought and effort create a tangible, pretty thing at a reasonable, predictable pace. This rarely happens in life.
The patterns also remind me of labyrinths, which some people use as a sort of therapy -a calming walk through a winding path. (Labyrinths aren't mazes; there are no dead ends, and it's easy enough to get in and out.) Coloring in a pattern is a lot like walking a paper labyrinth. There's nothing to trap you, there's nothing to solve. You just wander down the path until you're done. It feels simultaneously like repetition and progression.

It takes a good while to color one of these things in completely-a few hours, I'd say-and there's something very satisfying about watching the color slowly spread across the page, about seeing your thought and effort create a tangible, pretty thing at a reasonable, predictable pace. This rarely happens in life. (One of my most charming or insufferable qualities is that I make everything into a metaphor for life.)

I haven't become a hardcore colorer or anything. I'm sure my interest in this hobby will wax and wane with my whims, just as it does with knitting and nail-painting and cooking things that aren't quesadillas. But as someone who can't sit and breathe deeply and try to calm my thoughts for even 30 seconds without getting itchy all over, it's nice to have something other than meditation that still feels meditative. To sit and follow the lines to an end that's within sight.

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Frugal innovation is gaining popularity for its focus on creating affordable, efficient solutions with limited resources. It’s relevant today as businesses and individuals seek cost-effective, sustainable ways to address challenges. As people become more conscious of resource constraints and environmental impact, frugal innovation offers practical, impactful solutions that meet essential needs without excessive consumption

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Frugal innovation is gaining popularity for its focus on creating affordable, efficient solutions with limited resources. It’s relevant today as businesses and individuals seek cost-effective, sustainable ways to address challenges. As people become more conscious of resource constraints and environmental impact, frugal innovation offers practical, impactful solutions that meet essential needs without excessive consumption

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Frugal innovation: why low cost doesn’t have to mean low impact

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Science is starting to recognize the movement to create mass-market products using local knowledge and materials to improve lives around the world.

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post 19:The article from The Conversation explores the rise of the “underconsumption core” trend, which is gaining popularity on platforms like TikTok. This trend emphasizes minimalism and frugality, encouraging people to buy only what they truly need and maximize the utility of their purchases. Instead of showcasing large hauls of clothing or other items, users are posting videos of thrift store finds, modest wardrobes, and practical, well-used everyday items1.

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post 19:The article from The Conversation explores the rise of the “underconsumption core” trend, which is gaining popularity on platforms like TikTok. This trend emphasizes minimalism and frugality, encouraging people to buy only what they truly need and maximize the utility of their purchases. Instead of showcasing large hauls of clothing or other items, users are posting videos of thrift store finds, modest wardrobes, and practical, well-used everyday items1.

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Economic Pressures: Rising costs and financial burdens, especially among Gen Z and Millennials ¹.

Environmental Concerns: Growing awareness of the environmental impact of mass consumerism ¹.

Social Pressures: Reaction against influencer culture and overconsumption ¹.

Sustainability: Increased interest in sustainable living and reducing waste ¹.

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A new TikTok trend called "underconsumption core" is gaining traction online. This trend champions minimalism and frugality, and encourages people to maximize the utility of their purchases and buy only what they truly need, challenging the culture of consumerism.

Instead of showcasing large hauls of clothing, makeup or over-flowing fridge shelves, users are posting videos showing thrift store purchases, modest wardrobes and practical, well-used everyday items.

The rise of this trend can be linked to several challenges facing young people today, including increasing economic pressures, environmental concerns and social pressures, all of which are particularly affecting Gen Z and younger Millennials. If you're also feeling financially squeezed, this trend might resonate with you.

Similar to the deinfluencing trend, underconsumption also appears to be a reaction to overconsumption - especially the way influencers have normalized it by posting haul videos. By promoting underconsumption, online users are rejecting and pushing back against this aspect of "influencer culture."
No one's 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you're not alone. Read more from Quarter Life:
Born of necessity

Young people are likely engaging with it as a way to adapt to increasing financial pressures.

For instance, the average federal student loan debt balance in the United States is US$37,574 per borrower, according to the Education Data Initiative. Student debt is a significant financial burden that often forces young adults to prioritize debt repayment over discretionary spending.

Inflation is also continuing to erode Gen Z's purchasing power. While there are signs of economic relief, such as interest rate cuts in Canada, the cumulative effects of high prices continue to strain young peoples' budgets.

Underconsumption core represents a growing awareness and adaptation to these economic realities, but it's not the only reason. Another driver of the underconsumption trend appears to be environmental consciousness.

Environmental concerns

Mass consumerism has created significant environmental problems, including the generation of vast amounts of waste. In Chile's Atacama Desert, an estimated 11,000 to 59,000 tons of used clothing is sitting in a landfill. This is just one example of how overconsumption is polluting the environment.

A report from ThredUp, an online vintage-resale platform, found that 65 per cent of Gen Z respondents wanted to shop more sustainably. However, one-third felt "addicted to fast fashion," and 72 per cent said they shopped for fast fashion in 2022. Similarly, researchers from Sheffield Hallam University found 90 per cent of university students bought fast fashion in 2022.

Despite this, many of these same consumers are concerned with sustainability and are actively seeking ways to be more responsible. Our recent study found a consistent shift in consumer attitudes towards sustainability practices, especially in fashion. This is particularly the case with Gen Z, who rely heavily on social media for shopping inspiration.

As younger consumers become more aware of the environmental impact of their purchasing decisions, they are increasingly drawn to sustainable fashion content.

This shift in consumer mentality aligns with the broader cultural phenomenon known as the " Marie Kondo effect," named after the Japanese organizing consultant. She is an advocate for only keeping things that bring one value and joy. Kondo's influence has sparked a growing interest in intentional consumption.

However, it is important to note that, in some instances, sustainable consumption behaviours may be driven more by selfish motives than purely altruistic ones. By choosing to consume less or more mindfully, younger individuals can project an image of thoughtfulness, responsibility and uniqueness - qualities that are increasingly valued in the social media landscape.

How to be a healthier consumer

If you are interested in practising healthier consumption habits, it's important to understand how you can sustain this lifestyle long-term. There are two main strategies you can use to do this.

First, find a way to strike a balance between frugality and quality of life to maintain your overall well-being. Research suggests a mix of experiential spending (such as travel) and material purchases (such as a new smartphone) can lead to greater happiness and satisfaction.

Don't completely abandon material purchases in favour of experiences. Instead, a thoughtful approach that includes both types of spending, albeit at a reduced overall level, will likely lead to better outcomes. This approach focuses more on mindful consumption, rather than blanket restrictions.

Second, try to focus on improving your financial literacy. Start by creating a budget that ensures basic needs and baseline expenses are met. Seek to understand the types of financial products and solutions that fit your particular needs. This will help you avoid overconsumption and make choices that support long-term financial stability.

Those with higher financial literacy are better equipped to select products that align with their needs and values, rather than falling prey to aggressive marketing or unnecessary features that can lead to overconsumption. For instance, young consumers are likely to spend more on credit cards that offer attractive rewards leading to overconsumption and strained budgets over the long-term.

While the underconsumption trend offers potential benefits, it's important to approach it in a balanced way. While combining healthy spending habits with financial literacy is key, it shouldn't be about deprivation. Instead, you should make informed choices that align with your personal values and goals. Done right, underconsumption can lead to financial stability and a more purposeful lifestyle.

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Understanding 'underconsumption core': How a new trend is challenging consumer culture

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'Underconsumption core' is a trend that challenges overconsumption by encouraging people to maximize the utility of their purchases and buy only what they truly need.

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32. Global Feminist Movements in 2024: Pushing for Equality and Amplifying Voices

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32. Global Feminist Movements in 2024: Pushing for Equality and Amplifying Voices

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In 2024, global feminist movements are at the forefront of advocating for gender equality, with landmark events such as the 30th anniversary of the Conference on Population and Development emphasizing human rights, gender inclusion, and sustainable development. Campaigns like the "16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence" continue to raise awareness on eliminating violence against women, while countries like France lead with progressive feminist diplomacy strategies.

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Date: Wednesday, March 6, 2019
This story was originally published on Medium.com/@UN_Women
Women have always risen. Women are rising today. Women will always rise.

From the women who came together in Seneca Falls for the United States first women's conference, to the Mirabal sisters who protested dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and everyone who has shared their #MeToo story on social media, the women who've risen up to claim their rights and to protect the rights of others, have changed the world as we know.

On International Women's Day, we're celebrating women activists around the world who have insisted on a better world and persisted in the face of adversity.

Keep reading to learn how International Women's Day started, and about women rising, then and now.

The beginning: Women's suffrage, labour rights and revolution

Since the earliest days of its history, International Women's Day has been a day for women to unite for a common cause, even when women were protesting World War I.

The first International Women's Day in 1911 saw more than one million people across Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland mobilizing for women's suffrage and labour rights.

In 1917, a large women-led demonstration demanded "bread and peace!" in Russia, and four days later, the Czar abdicated. Now a Russian national holiday, the Day is what some historians credit with Russian Revolution.
Demanding women's right to vote in the United States, 1920
The 19 th Amendment granted women in the United States the right to vote in 1920, more than 30 years after New Zealand became the first country to do so.

The women's suffrage movement in the US started in 1848 at the country's first women's rights convention. After being barred from speaking at an anti-slavery convention, Americans Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott brought together hundreds of people in Seneca Falls, New York. There, they demanded civil, political and religious rights for women, and kicked-off the women's suffrage movement in the United States.
Driving political change in the Dominican Republic, 1960

Minerva. Maria. Patria.

"Las Mariposas" became symbols of feminist resistance when they protested dictatorship. Discover our timeline of women's rights movements: https://t.co/0wJbWm2zpc #TimeIsNow pic.twitter.com/KlVQIUe9NQ
- UN Women (@UN_Women) December 23, 2018

Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa Mirabal were outspoken political activists and leaders of the resistance against the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Despite Trujillo's persecution, the sisters continued advocating for change and respect and human rights for all. In November 1960, Trujillo declared that his two problems were the church and the Mirabal sisters.

On 25 November 1960, the sisters were assassinated. Their death shocked and enraged the nation, leading continued public outcry. Their assassination is considered one of the events that helped accelerate Dominican Republic's independence movement, and within a year, Trujillo's dictatorship came to an end.

To honor the Mirabal sisters, 25 November was named International Day for the Elimination of Violence against women.

And Now...
Protecting indigenous lands in Kenya
In Kenya, women of the Rendille community in Marsabit County, banded together to protect their lands when investors came in and claimed it as their own.

"It really brought our community together, to work towards a solution," says Alice Lesepen, a member of the community. "We started having community meetings, especially the women, to come together with one voice and claim back our land. We really want to be part of the development project. Can we be informed? Can it be done with our consent?"

The Rendille people, with women's voices at the center, took the developer to court in the hopes of protecting their communal lands.

The case is still pending.
Ending child marriage in India
Across five rural Indian states, Women's Peer Groups are working to end child marriage in their communities. In community meetings, these leaders are asking participants to pledge that they won't have their daughters married underage-or attend such weddings. After the pledging ceremony, they lead rallies in their villages to spread awareness about the negative impacts of child marriage.

"If all people start boycotting such weddings, it would definitely help eliminate child marriage," says Malti Tudu, a 20-year-old activist from Simalbari village. "People are needed during a marriage ceremony-a priest to perform the religious rites, musical band to play the music, cook to prepare the food for the guests, and guests to give their blessings to the newlyweds."

Malti also leads interventions when they hear about a planned child marriage, gathering as many community members as possible and going to the home to advocate for the girls' education and rights.
Advocating for Syria's future
The Syrian Women's Advisory Board, established by the UN Special Envoy for Syria, works ensure that women's perspectives and leadership is taken into account in the peace process. Composed of 12 independent women from Syrian civil society with diverse backgrounds, the Board works to show that Syrian women are not just victims, they are also leaders and need to be a part of the peace process.

"Women are leading efforts to push forward, but also asking for more stability," says Rajaa Altalli, a member of the Board and co-founder of the Center for Civil Society and Democracy, which works to strengthen community engagement and advocacy for peace in Syria. "They are pushing for political transition towards democracy in Syria, which is very promising, but they are risking their lives to tell the truth."

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Women rising: Women's activism that has shaped the world as you know it

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Date: Wednesday, March 6, 2019 This story was originally published on Medium.com/@UN_Women Women have always risen. Women are rising today. Women will always rise.

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1. Thrift shopping is trending due to its sustainable approach, offering eco-friendly alternatives to fast fashion. As consumers become more conscious of environmental impact and seek unique, vintage items, thrift stores provide affordable and distinctive options. The rise of social media also promotes thrift culture, with influencers showcasing stylish finds, further fueling interest and making thrifting a popular choice for fashion-savvy shoppers.

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1. Thrift shopping is trending due to its sustainable approach, offering eco-friendly alternatives to fast fashion. As consumers become more conscious of environmental impact and seek unique, vintage items, thrift stores provide affordable and distinctive options. The rise of social media also promotes thrift culture, with influencers showcasing stylish finds, further fueling interest and making thrifting a popular choice for fashion-savvy shoppers.

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Second to none, thrifting set to outpace apparel market

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The rising number of offline and online thrift stores are in consonance with the demand, as indicated by reports too.

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3. The article explains “deinfluencing,” a trend where influencers advise against certain purchases, promoting conscious consumerism and countering overconsumption driven by social media.

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3. The article explains “deinfluencing,” a trend where influencers advise against certain purchases, promoting conscious consumerism and countering overconsumption driven by social media.

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Deinfluencers are still influencers, ultimately seeking to sway your spending habits. But instead of propping products up, they tend to tell their followers what they shouldn't buy-whether because it's overpriced, potentially harmful, or ethically questionable. In many respects, they have carved out a distinctive niche in influencer culture, one characterized by candor, subjectivity, and a general credibility no longer reliably ascribed to creators with brand endorsement deals.

How did it start?

While the movement's precise origins are difficult to pinpoint, skepticism about influencers and paid content has been mounting online for years. Social media personalities like Khabane Lame (@khaby.lame), who found internet fame creating playful (and silent) takedowns of so-called life hacks, reflected a broader frustration with a world (and, more specifically, a social media landscape) choked with unnecessary products. (Boasting more than 161 million followers, Lame has become the most-followed person on TikTok.)

What was Mascaragate, and what did that have to do with deinfluencing?

A touch of social media scandal also had its part to play in the rise of deinfluencing. Back in January, beauty influencer Mikayla Nogueira posted a rave (and paid) review of L'Oréal's Telescopic Lift Mascara. The video, which includes a shot of Nogueira's suddenly voluminous lashes, went viral after fans speculated that she'd used Ardell Wispies to enhance the makeup's effect. (Nogueira denied the claims.)

Yet beyond the demand for greater transparency from social media users, a growing consumer fatigue-and sense of consumer guilt, particularly against the backdrop of global war and eco-anxiety-has also motivated the trend toward deinfluencing. "Especially in the current climate, any kind of shopping feels almost dystopian," says Venetia La Manna, cofounder of Remember Who Made Them, a collective that spotlights the plight of modern garment workers. "I will scroll through my feeds, and it's so incredibly jarring to see a post about genocide, and then the next point you see is someone trying to sell you hot chocolate."

While some deinfluencers have pivoted to recommending different goods-platforming products that they feel are superior to the ones being pushed-the real spirit of the exercise, according to La Manna, is to get people to stop shopping, period. "There's absolutely space to encourage people to buy an item that is either secondhand or from a brand that is really thinking about their supply chains and the ethics within that supply," she says. But the question that deinfluencing really asks is: "How can we be buying less and instead educating ourselves more?

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What Is Deinfluencing? Unpacking TikTok's Unlikeliest Shopping Trend

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Deinfluencing: an authentic rejection of hyper-consumerism or just a marketing ploy by another name? We dive in.

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Bollywood’s Bangs Revival: Stars Leading the 2024 Trend

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Bollywood’s Bangs Revival: Stars Leading the 2024 Trend

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In 2024, Bollywood has embraced the bangs revival, with stars flaunting fresh, bold fringe styles that redefine chic. From micro bangs to longer, wispy fringes, these hairstyles are gaining popularity across red carpets and movie screens. Celebrities like Deepika Padukone and Alia Bhatt are at the forefront of this trend, experimenting with edgy and versatile bangs that complement both casual and glamorous looks. Whether it's sleek or textured, these bangs reflect Bollywood’s evolving fashion aesthetic, marrying timeless elegance with contemporary flair.

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Bollywood's Bangs Revival: Stars Leading the Trend

The resurgence of bangs in Bollywood is more than just a fleeting trend; it represents a bold fashion statement that reflects the evolving aesthetics of the industry. In recent times, several stars have embraced this hairstyle, influencing fans and fashion enthusiasts alike. This essay explores the celebrities leading the bangs revival in Bollywood, highlighting their impact on contemporary fashion.
Indianfastearning.com
Embracing a Classic Look

Bangs have long been associated with a classic and sophisticated look. In Bollywood, this trend is making a strong comeback, thanks to stars who have revived this hairstyle with modern twists. One prominent figure in this resurgence is Deepika Padukone. Known for her impeccable style, Padukone has seamlessly incorporated bangs into her look, whether it be for red carpet events or casual outings. Her ability to balance the traditional charm of bangs with contemporary fashion has made her a trendsetter.

New Age Icons

Another influential star in this trend is Janhvi Kapoor. Kapoor has been seen sporting various styles of bangs, from curtain bangs to blunt cuts. Her versatility in adopting different looks has shown how bangs can be styled to suit various occasions and outfits. Kapoor's choice of bangs adds a youthful and dynamic element to her appearance, resonating with a younger audience that seeks both glamour and relatability in their style icons.

The Bold and the Beautiful

Kangana Ranaut, known for her fearless fashion choices, has also contributed significantly to the bangs revival. Ranaut's embrace of bold, statement-making bangs aligns perfectly with her larger-than-life persona. Her ability to pull off dramatic and edgy looks with bangs underscores the versatility of this hairstyle, proving that it can complement a range of personalities and styles. Ranaut's influence has encouraged many to experiment with their looks, embracing bangs as a way to express individuality.

A Trend with Versatility

The beauty of bangs lies in their versatility. They can be styled in numerous ways, making them a flexible choice for different hair types and face shapes. Alia Bhatt is another Bollywood star who has effectively used bangs to enhance her look. Bhatt's soft, wispy bangs have added a touch of elegance to her appearance, showcasing how bangs can be both stylish and understated. Her choice has made bangs a go-to option for those looking to add a subtle yet impactful change to their hairstyle.

Bangs on the Big Screen

Bollywood films have also played a significant role in popularizing bangs. Characters in various movies sporting bangs have captured the audience's imagination, further cementing the hairstyle's place in contemporary fashion. Actresses like Ananya Panday have showcased bangs in their roles, blending character-driven fashion with real-world trends. This crossover between cinema and everyday style demonstrates the significant impact Bollywood has on shaping fashion trends.

A Global Influence

The revival of bangs in Bollywood is not an isolated trend but part of a broader global movement. International celebrities have also embraced this hairstyle, influencing Bollywood stars and fans alike. The interplay between global fashion trends and Bollywood's unique style sensibilities has created a vibrant fashion landscape where bangs are celebrated across cultures. This global influence has contributed to the widespread acceptance and popularity of bangs in Bollywood.

Personal Style and Identity

The resurgence of bangs is not just about following a trend but also about personal expression. For many Bollywood stars, bangs represent a form of self-expression and individuality. Whether it's through classic cuts or innovative styles, bangs allow stars to convey their personalities and fashion sensibilities. This personal connection to the hairstyle has played a significant role in its revival, making it a meaningful choice for both celebrities and their fans.

Future of Bangs in Bollywood

As Bollywood continues to evolve, the trend of bangs is likely to adapt and innovate. The influence of current stars and their creative approaches to styling will shape the future of this hairstyle. With ongoing experimentation and the introduction of new styles, bangs are expected to remain a prominent feature in Bollywood fashion. The versatility and adaptability of bangs ensure that they will continue to be a popular choice for years to come.

Conclusion

Bollywood's revival of bangs reflects a dynamic blend of classic elegance and modern flair. Stars like Deepika Padukone, Janhvi Kapoor, Kangana Ranaut, Alia Bhatt, and Ananya Panday have led this trend with their unique interpretations of bangs, influencing both fashion and personal style. The global impact and the versatility of this hairstyle underscore its significance in contemporary fashion. As Bollywood continues to embrace and innovate, bangs will likely remain a stylish and expressive choice, resonating with audiences and setting new trends in the industry.

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revivalBollywood's bangs revival: Stars who are leading the trend 2024 - indian fast earning

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46. The 2000s & '90s Resurgence: 23 Fashion Trends Making a Comeback

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46. The 2000s & '90s Resurgence: 23 Fashion Trends Making a Comeback

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Fashion in 2024 is heavily influenced by the early 2000s and '90s, with iconic trends like frosted eyeshadows, oversized denim, and chunky platform shoes making a return. Key pieces include slip dresses, baby tees, baggy cargo pants, and bold accessories like choker necklaces and micro sunglasses. The revival of nostalgic styles from these eras is both playful and chic, blending vintage flair with modern updates. From Y2K-inspired tech-wear to grunge aesthetics, these retro looks are being reimagined for today’s generation of fashion enthusiasts.

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23 Early Aughts & ’90s Fashion Trends That Are Coming Back In Style - Glam

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If you live for nostalgia, you’ll probably be excited about these major retro trends from the ’90s and ’00s making a significant comeback in the modern era.