A mother’s day gift [Video]

This young Ethiopian lad decided to return the favour for his mom’s sacrifices for him – he paid off her mortgage. Watch his short story here

“At one point in my life I hadn’t been home for two and a half years, I hadn’t spoken to anyone or sent any emails,” he said. “I remember the day I came back, I had all my luggage with me and I just knocked at the door. She opened it, she said ‘Hi’, she smiled at me and she just asked me what I wanted for dinner. You know, she didn’t ask me any questions, she just let me come in with everything I had. I guess it’s unconditional love.”

How much of your life are you selling off? [Article]

David changes the frame of reference for working. In a long(ish) essay, he articulates the reason why more people are preferring to ‘retire’ early from employment:

…the great majority (of people) prefer the work phase’s evenings and weekends. We like to be able to decide what to do with our lives. Those of us with jobs have arranged to sell off large parts of our lives (8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for decades) to employers, in exchange for money that we can use to build a life that makes us happy.

He also finds a common theme in people who have done such a change:

They observe the relationship between their happiness and their spending, and they stop wasting their income on things that don’t return much happiness. The main difference between the ER (early retirement) crowd and regular working people is that they strive to be rational with their money, in terms of what it actually does for their quality of life.

There’s quite a few links with more material at the end of that article, if this topic interests you.

The psychology of hating food (and how we learn to love it) – article

Joseph Castro explains why kids who hate certain foods grow up into adults can’t seem to get enough of them. Quoting from research, he says:

“Up until the age of 2 you will eat anything, But then you become neophobic — that is, you don’t like new food. So if you hadn’t already been exposed to a certain flavor by the time you hit your terrible twos — whether through amniotic fluid, breast milk or solid food — chances are you won’t like it.

At this point, most parents make a big mistake. They think, ‘Oh my child doesn’t like this,’ but it’s actually anything new that they don’t like . So parents typically stop trying to feed their child that food and the kid ends up apparently hating it for years to come. They don’t know that if they just keep giving it to their child, they’ll eventually like it.