Like many teenagers, I was once troubled by anxiety and dissatisfaction-feelings that my parents often met with puzzlement rather than sympathy. They were already in their 50s, and having grown up in postwar Britain, they struggled to understand the sources of my discontentment.

“The problem with your generation is that you always desire to be happy.” my mother once said. I was puzzled. Surely happiness was the purpose of living, and we should spare no efforts to achieve it at every opportunity. I simply wasn’t prepared to accept my unhappiness as something that was beyond my control.

But I have noticed a shift in thinking, and I am now coming to the conclusion that my mother’s judgement was spot on. Over the past 10 years, numerous studies have shown that our obsession (痴迷) with happiness and high personal confidence may be making us less content with our lives, and less effective at reaching our actual goals. Indeed, we may often be happy when we stop focusing on happiness altogether.

While greater contentment is achievable, don’t expect miracle, and accept that no matter how hard you try, feeling of frustration and unhappiness will appear from time to time. In reality, certain negative feelings can serve a useful purpose.

When we feel sad, it’s often because we have learned something painful but important, while stress can motivate you to make some changes to your life. The last thing you should do is to blame yourselves for occasionally feeling bad when plans don’t work out.

Eventually, you might adopt the old saying “Prepare for the worst, hope for the best and be unsurprised by everything in between.” As my mother tried to teach me all those years ago, ease the pressure off yourself. and you may find that contentment arrives when you’re least expecting it.

After you finish your fries, eat the ketchup packet. When you add your pasta to boiling waler, put the bag into the pot, too. If these instructions sound confusing to you, it’s only because you haven’t yet heard of Notpla, a London-based startup company that is designing a seaweed-based replacement for single-use plastic packaging. Notpla design director Karlijn Sibbel says they look lo nature as inspiration for the ideal packaging like the skin on a fruit. “A peel will eventually be used as nutrients by nature, and disappear and become a part of the cycle.” she said.

According to the UN, 9.15 billion tons of plastic has been produced since the early 1950s, and about 60% has been land-filled or abandoned outdoors. Micro-plastics, which are often the result of larger plastics breaking down, pollute the ocean, the air and our bodies. Over the past few years, there has been a growing movement against single-use plastics as many experts have argued the products are unnecessary and harmful. In the US, some places have taken action: New York banned most plastic shopping bags, and in Miami Beach, plastic straws have been outlawed. “Overseas, the European Union put a broad ban on single-use plastics into effect this summer.” the government announced in August.

Notpla’s founders, Rodrigo Garoia González and Pierre Paslie, initially looked to seaweed as the solution to the world’s plastic problem because “it is abundant, grows quickly, doesn’t compete with land crops.” Sibbel explained. There are also many different seaweed species, and it can be harvested or farmed. Seaweed doesn’t use land; it doesn’t use pesticides. It can grow into the ocean and the sea, where it actually has a lot of positive benefits so it can create new ecosystems for other organisms to thrive in.

“As they scale up, Notpla’s team hopes seaweed could replace single-use plastic in the supply chain more broadly.” Sibbel said. But with the volume of plastics used around the world, she understands the enormity (巨大) of such a task. “I don’t think one material or one solution is going to solve everything, but we think that seaweed really ticks the right boxes.” she said.

By being able to nail for belle food, cuttlefish showed self-control that’s linked to the higher intelligence. It was part of an experiment by Alex Schnell from the University of Cambridge and colleagues. “What surprised me most was the level of self-control shown by cuttlefish.” she tells Weekend Edition.

The experiment was essentially a take on the classic “marshmallow” experiment from the 1960s. In that experiment, young children were presented with one marshmallow and told that if they can resist eating it for several minutes, they will get two marshmallows. But if they eat it, that’s all they get. The children who are able to delay gratification do better on tests and are more successful later in life.

To adapt the experiment for cuttlefish, the researchers first figured out the cuttlefish’s favorite food: live grass shrimp; and their second-favorite food: a piece of king prawn. Instead of choosing one or two marshmallows, the cuttlefish had to choose either their favorite food or second-favorite food. Each of the food items were placed in clear chambers within their tank. One chamber would open immediately, while the other chamber would only open after a delay. It essentially tested whether they could resist the temptation (诱惑) of their second preference food and wait for their preferred food.

The cuttlefish learned to wait. “Animals like rats and pigeons find it difficult to resist temptation, only waiting for several seconds,” Schnell says, “while animals such as chimpanzees and parrots show more advanced self-control and wail up to several minutes. And the cuttlefish in our study waited up to between 50 to 130 seconds.”

Animals that are able to exercise self-control in this way have advantages. For example, animals can hide food to eat later. In cuttlefish, Schnell thinks the delayed gratification relates to their lifestyle. “Individuals who wait for better-quality prey could find food more efficiently and limit their exposure to predators.”Schnell writes.