Happy New Year!
2023 is here – can you believe it? I, for one, am excited for the year to unveil its surprises. Unusual for me, but hey – it means therapy is working, hehe!
All this week, we’re sending you our favourite Things from 2022, starting with moi.
Welcome to the final Just One Thing of 2022. The JOT team is taking a break to ring in the new year, hoping that the year is one to celebrate for all of us.
Seeing as this our last dispatch for the year, I thought it might be the perfect opportunity to look back at some numbers from last year. Unlike made-up statistics and Twitter polls, what I’m sharing today are real stats about the year gone past.
If you’re somewhat close to me in age, you’ll probably agree that adulting can be tough.
It’s not just the money-making, bill-paying, career-building or purpose-finding that’s exhausting. After all, those are just portions of your life. What about everything else?
I’m part of a family in which the first question asked when we wake up is “what’s for breakfast?” and before breakfast is even over, we wonder, “so, what’s for lunch?”
I think about food a lot. Over time, I’ve engaged with food in many different ways. I eat, obviously. I’m not a vampire. But I’ve also had phases where I’ve been obsessed with cooking, posting about the food I’m cooking, binge-watching food videos (Tasty videos and Babish are especially satisfying), growing my own food, or reading about food.
Are you getting ready to have yourself a merry little Merry Christmas? Have you ordered your plum cake and wine? Me, I’m just sitting here hoping we all get to see another Christmas on this little blue rock so fine.
Argentina wins the World Cup! Messi lifts the coveted trophy! Millions celebrate across the globe!
All true.
Also true that thousands of migrant workers died in building the infrastructure Qatar needed to host this tournament.
One of my pet peeves is how little people seem to care about online privacy. Or even offline piracy, for that matter. However, what people do offline is beyond the purview of this newsletter. Online privacy though… that is something people should care about way more than they do.
A couple of years ago, I was bitten by the travel bug.
I bought one-way tickets out of my city, took solo trips, volunteered, made new friends, and visited old ones in cities I’d never been to.
Along the way, I gathered wholesome stories, snippets of songs in languages I don’t speak, and just enough words in regional languages to help me get by.
How often have we seen in movies and TV shows a character who is a bit of a social outcast but still seems nice enough? He may even be a girl’s best friend until it becomes clear that she is romantically interested in someone not him. That’s when the facade crumbles, and we see that this “nice guy” is actually an insecure and entitled jerk who can’t understand why the woman he’s into doesn’t feel the same way about him.
Pre-pandemic, remote work was considered a no-no, frowned upon by corporates the world over. The managerial assumption was that remote workers will while their time away and not contribute output at the same level as they would in the office. Of course, the pandemic upended that assumption, albeit temporarily. Lots of companies around the world are scrapping their remote work policies and making in-office mandatory. A few others are using a “hybrid” model where you can work remotely, some of the time.