We live in a society based on instant gratification. Hungry? A microwave will have you eating in minutes. Getting your dream car is a simple matter of signing up for debt. And months of pining for a perfumed reply from your true love is replaced by a simple click on send/receive. Life has become convenient, but are we better off for it? Here are 10 things we miss out on by not be willing to wait.
Life expectancy in the U.S. fell in 2021, for the second year in a row.
In 2019, someone born in the U.S. had a life expectancy of nearly 80 years. In 202o, because of the pandemic, that dropped to 77 years. In 2021 life-span dropped again — to 76.1 years. And for some Americans, life expectancy is even lower, according to a provisional analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
You get to wake up early for work. You get to make another sales call for your business. You get to cook dinner for your family. By simply changing one word, you shift the way you view each event. You transition from seeing these behaviors as burdens and turn them into opportunities.
The key point is that both versions of reality are true. You have to do those things, and you also get to do them. We can find evidence for whatever mind-set we choose.
But how did this defunct train station end up looking like a neighborhood on Google Maps? Sisson got lucky in his search—one site specified a Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) number for Haberman, part of a system used by the U.S. Geological Survey. The USGS maps had spaced neighborhood and train station names differently so they could be distinguished from one another, but somewhere along the line there had been some confusion, and Haberman was clearly listed as a populated place. Sisson speculates that a USGS employee made the simple mistake when the old maps were being digitized, and then those data got a second life then they were picked up by Google Maps’ algorithms.