【推荐1】If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal (夜间活动的) species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.

The benefits of this kind of engineering come with consequence called light pollution whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and completely changes the light levels and light rhythms to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life is affected.

In most cities the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze (霾) that mirrors our fear of the dark. We’ve grown so used to this orange haze that the original glory of an unlit night—dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadow on Earth—is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost.

We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country, when nothing could be further from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being “captured” by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms. Migrating at night, birds tend to collide with brightly lit tall buildings.

Frogs living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses. Humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs. Like most other creatures, we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself.

Living in a glare of our making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural heritage—the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy—arching overhead.

【推荐3】There you are in your favorite clothing store. You don’t really need to buy anything, but everything is so cheap and stylish! Before you know it, you leave the store with bags and bags of new clothes.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem so bad. However, there are a lot of hidden costs behind the cheap price tags put forward by fast fashion brands.

To put it plainly, the fashion industry is terrible for the planet. Not only does it use up a lot of resources, but it also heavily pollutes the environment with chemicals, microplastics and unwanted waste. Fashion is one of the least sustainable (可持续发展的) industries on the planet, commented Michael Stanley-Jones, a program management officer with the United Nations Environment Program. “We’ve all become our own waste managers, hoarding fashion waste in our closets,” he noted. It doesn’t just take up space in our closets, though. It also ends up in landfills, too. In fact, three out of every five garments end up either being incinerated (焚毁) or sent to landfills.

But, thankfully, the fashion trend tides are changing.

People are increasingly examining their own consumption and what changes they can make to become sustainable, Jane Fellner, founder and CEO of sustainable fashion retailer Loopster, told the Guardian. In particular, with its typically lower prices and rare fashion finds, shopping secondhand has become an increasingly popular and eco-friendly option.

According to online reseller ThredUp, the secondhand market is predicted to reach $80 billion (about 518 billion yuan) by 2029. And, although fast fashion will continue to grow 20 percent over the next 10 years, secondhand fashion is expected to grow an unbelievable 185 percent in that same amount of time.

Fellner continued: “Secondhand has become more socially acceptable and, for some, cool. Thrifting (节约) is now massive on TikTok.”

The only true sustainable way to shop is to not shop at all, Rachel Kibbe, a brand consultant for ensuring sustainability in fashion, told Insider. Unless you’re buying clothes that already exist.

【推荐2】The last thing Caitlin Hipp would have expected as she prepared to turn 28 years old was to be living at home with her parents. All she’s ever wanted to do is to become an elementary school teacher. And in the meantime, she’s been working through her teaching certifications for four years after obtaining an education degree from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, US.

Hipp has racked up $100,000 in student loan debt and isn’t able to earn enough through working as a part-time skating instructor and restaurant server to live anywhere other than home.

The Pew Research Center recently reported that 2014 was a milestone in the evolving living arrangements of young adults in the US. For the first time since 1880, adults aged 18 to 34 became more likely to be living with a parent than to be living on their own. Before 2014, the most common living arrangement for young adults was to be living in their own property as part of a couple.

UBS Financial Services, a Swiss global financial services company, released a report that even suggests one reason for the growing number of young adults still living at home could be that their family doesn’t want them to leave.

The report shows that 74 percent of millennials(千禧一代) get some kind of financial support from their parents after college. It finds that boomers and millennials have redefined the ties that bind parents and children. “Millennials see their parents as peers, friends and mentors. Nearly three quarters talked with their parents more than once a week during college. In return, their parents happily provide financial support well into adulthood, helping fund everything for them.”

Stuart Hoffman, chief economist for the PNC Financial Group in the US, said although job growth for millennials since 2014 has improved, which doesn’t necessarily mean that millennials are starting to fly the nest. He said, “There’s no doubt it has held back household formation and purchases on things people spend money on related to household formation and perhaps related to child-rearing,” Hoffman explained. “But they are probably traveling more and eating out more if they don’t have a house expense or marriage. I don’t know if it represents a change in moral values. But it’s much more common for adult children to live in their parent’s homes because it’s becoming part of the culture.”

【推荐3】Search “toxic parents”, and you’ll find more than 38, 000 posts, largely urging young adults to cut ties with their families. The idea is to safeguard one’s mental health from offensive parents. However, as a psychoanalyst (精神分析学家), I’ve seen that trend in recent years become a way to manage conflicts in the family, and I have seen the severe impacts estrangement (疏远) has on both sides of the divide. This is a self-help trend that creates much harm.

“Canceling” your parent can be seen as an extension of a cultural trend aimed at correcting imbalances in power and systemic inequality. Today’s social justice values respond to this reality, calling on us to criticize oppressive and harmful figures and to gain power for those who have been powerless. But when adult children use the most effective tool they have—themselves—to gain a sense of security and ban their parents from their lives, the roles are simply switched, and the pain only deepens.

Often, what I see in my practice are cases of family conflict mismanaged, power dynamics turned upside down rather than negotiated. I see the terrible effect of that trend: situations with no winners, only isolated humans who long to be known and feel safe in the presence of the other.

The catch is that after estrangement, adult children are not suddenly less dependent. In fact, they feel abandoned and betrayed, because in the unconscious, it doesn’t matter who is doing the leaving; the feeling that remains is “being left”. They carry the ghosts of their childhood, tackling the emotional reality that those who raised us can never truly be left behind, no matter how hard we try.

What I have found is that most of these families need repair, not permanent break-up. How can one learn how to negotiate needs, to create boundaries and to trust? How can we love others, and ourselves, if not through accepting the limitations that come with being human? Good relationships are not the result of a perfect level of harmony but rather of successful adjustments.

To pursue dialogue instead of estrangement will be hard and painful work. It can’t be a single project of “self-help”, because at the end of the day, real intimacy (亲密关系) is achieved by working through the injuries of the past together. In most cases of family conflict, repair is possible and preferable to estrangement—and it’s worth the work.