After ten years in the same company, I found my job was no longer fun. However, I didn’t have the confidence to look for new jobs because of lack of experience. I felt ________.

A friend suggested another path — ________. I had toyed with the idea of studying for a master’s degree but ________ stood in my way. Yet I found a course at London College of Communication, gave up my job and entered my college.

During the 18 months that followed, I began to flourish. Not only had I found the courage to take my ________ forward in a new, exciting direction, ________ the self-doubt that had followed me around like a shadow began to disappear gradually. My classmates and I treated each other as equals. Younger students thought my experience and knowledge were of great value when it came to group work. I made new friends and joined committees.

I also decided to move out of home. Living in student halls was a(n) ________. The hall life added to my sense of independence and, with it, confidence. I was ________ new things every day. Even making myself a meal or ________ my small living space felt rewarding.

Soon after completing my master’s, I made my way back through the university gates — this time to ________. I am now a professor of the same course that I took. I look back on the person I was before and smile — she didn’t yet know her ________.

If you’re like many teens, you probably spend a great deal of your money on clothes. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, clothing sales fell. Now holiday sales might tempt you with deals on the latest styles. Yet many of these bargains (便宜货) have hidden costs for the environment—and your wallet.

“Fast fashion” refers to how the clothing industry quickly produces lots of cheap clothes and gets them to stores every few weeks. The practice lets shoppers buy new styles all the time. And clothes prices are low. But many of these clothes quickly wear out or go out of style. Their price tags also don’t include all of the clothes’ environmental costs.

“The problem starts with how we think about fashion,” says Kirsi Niinimaki. She’s a fashion, textile and design researcher. “Everyone nowadays owns too many clothes. And we use them a really short time and then dispose of them,” she says. Even if something stays in your closet for years, you might only end up wearing it some 40 times.

Kirsi was part of a team that looked at many studies on the environmental costs of the fashion industry. They found that this industry caused 8 to 10 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The industry is also responsible (有责任的) for about one-fifth of the world’s industrial water pollution. And people produce more than 92 million metric tons of textile and clothing waste each year, the team found. Its report appeared in the April issue of Nature Reviews.

Fashion is a global industry, as Pietra Rivoli learned. She’s an economist at Georgetown University. Rivoli bought a cotton T-shirt in Florida. The tag said it was made in China. But, she learned, the factory had gotten most of its cotton from Texas. Used or unwanted T-shirts are often popular in Africa. There, people sold them for reuse. She wrote about her findings in The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy.

The journey of your own clothes from fiber to finished products comes with environmental costs. Scientists and engineers have been working on ways to limit some of these influences.

A Pathway (路径) to Meaning in Life

When it comes to a meaningful life, we might think of love, happiness and health. A life filled with meaning is what most of us want for ourselves. Then, what makes a meaningful life?

Many researchers agree that a meaningful life comes down to three factors (因素): having long-term goals, believing that one’s life matters, and feeling that one’s life fits together and “makes sense”.

But we believe there is more to consider. Sometimes life enables us to experience small moments of beauty. When people are open to appreciating (欣赏) such experiences, these moments may improve how they see their own life. We call this experiential appreciation (EA). EA is about the person feeling connected to events and being able to appreciate the value within the connection. It shows the discovery of and admiration for life’s beauty.

We recently set out to better understand EA in studies. We were interested in whether EA was also tied to general judgment of meaning in life. If so, it could be a factor for meaningfulness.

In the first study, we had people rate (评估) their support for different methods of reducing stress. We found that people who managed stress by focusing on their appreciation for life’s beauty also reported experiencing life as highly meaningful.

In the next study, we asked people to rate the degree to which they agreed with various statements, such as “I appreciate the beauty of life” and “I appreciate little things in life,” as well as other statements that related to the three factors and a general sense of meaning in life. Our results showed that the more people reported that they were “appreciating life” and its many experiences, the more they felt their life was valuable.

In the following studies, we further looked at the connection between EA and meaningfulness. For example, we found that people who were asked to look back on the most meaningful event of the past week generally reported high EA in those moments.

All the results proved our theory (假设) true. But putting it into practice can be difficult. Our fast-paced lifestyles fill the day with goals. We try to get the highest output both at work and in spare time. This focus on future outcomes makes it all too easy to miss what is happening right now. We should slow down and let life surprise us.