REALITY CHECK: What are some life style changes people have made in the last three years? Thought for 12s Over the last three years (roughly 2023–2026), the changes that stuck for a lot of people are less “new year, new me” and more structural: how they work, what they swallow, what they track, and what they postpone.Work stayed partly at home. Full-time office life did not fully return. Hybrid and remote work settled in as a large minority of paid days (on the order of a quarter to a third in the U.S., higher for college-educated desk jobs). That bought back commute time, pushed home offices and “stay in on weekends” as defaults for many younger adults, and made housing choice less tied to a downtown office. Return-to-office mandates exist; they did not erase the shift. nber.org AI became a daily habit, not a demo. By 2026 surveys, a large majority of Gen Z and millennial workers say they use AI in day-to-day work—drafting, search, coding, admin. Many also use it for health questions. The lifestyle piece is the new loop: ask a model first, then maybe a person. That changed study, email, and “how do I cook this / is this rash weird” as much as office output. deloitte.com Weight-loss drugs changed bodies and plates. GLP-1 drugs (Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound and cousins) moved from niche diabetes meds to mass lifestyle tools as prices fell and use spread. People eat less, skip alcohol more often, and talk about protein and muscle because experts keep warning that rapid fat loss can strip lean mass. “Willpower” as the main obesity story lost ground. everydayhealth.com Wellness got more boring and more measured. Trends that lasted: walking protocols (including interval “Japanese walking”), strength training for aging, sleep tracking, fiber, fewer ultraprocessed defaults, wearables and sometimes CGMs. Cold plunges and supplement stacks had a moment; clinicians keep ranking movement, food quality, sleep, and not being isolated above biohacks. Social isolation is now treated as a health risk, not just a mood. usnews.com Going out got more expensive, so people stayed in. Especially among Gen Z, weekends at home became the cheap default. Dining and bars still happen, but “half the weekend in” is common, and many say going out is not worth the cost. Streaming, delivery, and group chats replaced some of the old Friday-night circuit. whatstrending.com Big life steps got delayed. Surveys in 2026 still show more than half of Gen Z and millennials putting off marriage, kids, a business, or more school because of money and housing. Homeownership is still wanted; timelines slipped. Pets, roommates, and “maybe later” replaced the old 30-by-30 checklist for a large slice of people. deloitte.com Shopping and clothes went secondhand and less dressy. Resale, thrift, and “good enough athleisure” stayed up. Sustainability talk mixed with inflation: buy used, buy less, or buy one thing that works for the office Zoom and the grocery run.None of this is universal. Nurses, cooks, and warehouse workers did not get the same hybrid deal as software staff. GLP-1s are still costly for many. The through-line is: more life happens at home, more decisions go through a phone or a model, health is treated as a project, and adulthood milestones wait on rent.
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QUALITY POST: What the 2025 numbers actually show ADL’s audit still found incidents in all 50 states. Raw totals were highest in New York (1,160), California (817), and New Jersey (687). Those are also the largest Jewish populations. Assaults were concentrated in New York City. National totals fell from the 2024 peak but stayed far above pre-2023 levels. FBI hate-crime data still has Jews as the large majority of religion-based victims. So “low incident count” in a small state can just mean few Jews, not a better civic culture. adl.org States that currently have the better combined reputationFlorida (especially South Florida). This is the loudest “safe to be openly Jewish” brand in the U.S. right now: large community, state-level enforcement posture, and a political class that treats synagogue security and campus disruption as law-and-order, not a speech puzzle. It also ranks well on economy and is in the U.S. News top 10 overall. Tradeoff: culture-war heat, insurance/climate costs, and it still recorded hundreds of incidents (319 in 2025) because the community is huge. vinnews.com Utah and parts of the Upper Midwest (Minnesota, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Iowa, New Hampshire). These dominate 2026 “best states” lists for schools, fiscal stability, crime, and family metrics. Day-to-day life for a generic resident is often calmer than in NY/CA. Jewish life exists but is thinner.
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What about when he gets free of those three placesWhen Christian finally gets free of the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, and Doubting Castle, his journey completely transforms. He enters a landscape that is the absolute antidote to the "dark feeling" and the chaotic information overload of the modern world.In Bunyan’s allegory, escaping those dark places leads him to a state of profound peace and clarity that provides a beautiful blueprint for how to find relief in your own life:🏔️ 1. The Delectable Mountains (The View from Above)Right after escaping Giant Despair, Christian reaches the Delectable Mountains. These mountains are full of gardens, orchards, and vineyards, and they are guarded by shepherds named Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere.What it means for you: After years of being trapped in the loops of overthinking, Christian is given a safe sanctuary. The shepherds give him a perspective from a higher ground, letting him look back at the treacherous path he survived with a sense of peace, rather than terror.☀️ 2. The Country of Beulah (Rest and Healing)Near the very end of his journey, Christian enters the land of Beulah. In this country, the air is incredibly sweet and calm. The story notes that here, "they were out of the reach of Giant Despair, and from this place they could not so much as see Doubting Castle." The sun shines night and day, and it is a place of total rest where the traveler waits before crossing over to their final home.What it means for you: Beulah represents a mind that has completely disconnected from the noise of the "Vanity Fair" internet and the heavy weight of global politics. It is a state of mind where the background noise finally goes quiet, and you are allowed to just be, safe and rested.🔑 How He Actually Escapes Doubting CastleThe most important part of the entire story is how Christian gets out of Doubting Castle in the first place. He and his companion Hopeful are locked in the dark dungeon for days, being beaten by Giant Despair.Then, at midnight, Christian suddenly remembers something. He cries out, "What a fool am I, thus to lie in a stinking dungeon, when I may as well walk at liberty! I have a key in my bosom, called Promise, that will, I am persuaded, open any lock in Doubting Castle." He pulls out the key, puts it in the lock, and the heavy iron doors fly open instantly.The key was in his possession the entire time; he just forgot he had it because he was so focused on the terrifying walls of the dungeon.
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I am wondering though are there physicists who say time is completely man made and is not real. Thought for 6s Yes — some physicists say that, but almost none mean “time is a made-up calendar like money.” They mean the flow, the global now, or time as a fundamental ingredient is not in the basic laws. Clocks, aging, and change still happen.Einstein already wrote that for physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is “only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” He meant there is no single moving present for the whole universe. He did not mean clocks are fake. physicsworld.com Julian Barbour is the blunt case. In The End of Time he argues there is no flowing time and no hidden time axis. Reality is a heap of complete “Nows.” What we call history is structure inside a Now (a “time capsule”), not travel along a line. Motion and passage are how we read differences between configurations. That is as close as a working physicist gets to “time is not real.” It is a minority view, taken seriously as a research program, not as settled fact. en.wikipedia.org Carlo Rovelli is the most visible living voice. He has written that time does not exist at the fundamental level: loop-quantum-gravity equations need no time variable; past and future look the same in microscopic laws; the “flow” is largely how a coarse-grained, heat-sensitive brain sits inside rising entropy. He also says our experience of time is not a mere error — it is real for us, like the sky “turning” because Earth rotates. So: not fundamental, not man-made from nothing, but perspectival. theguardian.com Others nearby, not identicalPage and Wootters: in a globally frozen quantum universe, “evolution” is entanglement with a clock subsystem. Nima Arkani-Hamed and many quantum-gravity / holography people: spacetime itself is probably emergent, not basic. Lee Smolin often disagrees with full timelessness and defends a real present; useful as a contrast. What almost nobody in physics claims: that seconds, cesium clocks, or “Tuesday” are arbitrary social inventions with no physical correlate. Units and calendars are human. Duration, causal order, and proper time along a worldline are not.So the accurate map is:Claim Who Status No universal flowing now Einstein, most relativists Mainstream Time not in the deepest equations Rovelli, some quantum gravity Active research Time is only an illusion; only static Nows Barbour Minority, discussed Time is a human convention like money Almost no physicist Not a physics position Your “time doesn’t exist” slogan sits nearest Barbour and popular Rovelli. The field’s careful version is: the thing we feel as a river is not a basic piece of the world; change and clocks still are.
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