1 . Yesterday, I was standing in line at a store and the song Please Come to Boston which was quite popular when I was in high school, came on in the background. I hadn’t heard it for years. Suddenly, I was overcome by flashbacks of people and places linked to that song from earlier stages of my life.

It seems people tend to be extremely nostalgic (怀旧的) about the music they listened to when they were young. Psychological research has shown that autobiographical memories (life experiences) from certain time periods are remembered better than others. One obvious phenomenon is the “reminiscence bump” (记忆隆起): the fact that people tend to recall memories from when they were 10 to 30 years old much better. That’s because this period contains many novel and self-defining life experiences such as graduation and marriage. Biological changes may also boost the effectiveness of our memories from this period.

In our experiment, we investigated the presence of the “musical reminiscence bump” in a group of 470 adults aged 18 to 82. Our aim was to examine how a person’s age when a song was popular affected three related but distinct concepts: the degree to which the song was associated with autobiographical memories, how familiar the song was and how much they liked the song. Participants were shown the titles and artists of 111 pop songs that had featured in the charts across a 65-year period (1950~2015). After a given time, they were asked to complete the measurement.

We discovered music during one’s adolescence was rated as more familiar. In addition, we found some songs were preferred regardless of a participant’s age. For instance, we saw a general increase in how much people liked songs from the late 1970s to early 1980s, even in participants who weren’t yet born during that time period. Examples of songs we used from this time period include Hotel California by the Eagles.

Music can undeniably cause nostalgia. For example, advertisers want to elicit (引出) a nostalgic reaction from a certain group of consumers. And they should notice doctors who aim to reconnect patients suffering from memory loss with self-defining memories from their pasts can also take advantage of nostalgia.

2 . Back in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that with technological change and improvements in productivity, we’d be working only 15 hours a week in the near future. But while working hours have declined by 26%, most of us still work 42.5 hours a week on average, according to Eurostat figures.

One of the things Keynes underestimated is our desire to compete with our peers — a drive that makes us work more than we need to. “We don’t measure productivity by how many acres we’ve harvested, so the amount of working time becomes an indicator.” says Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.

Due to computerization and globalization in the 1980s, managers could demand more of employees under the threat that jobs could be given to someone else, so the pressure increased. And we took it, overwhelmed with the pressure while shouldering the burden all the same at the cost of our health. Psychologist Barbara Killinger writes such a phenomenon in Workaholics: The Respectable Addicts.

But far from delivering productivity, value, or personal fulfillment, overwork has been proven to lead to burnout, stress, poor health, etc. Nevertheless, we persisted — until the fourth Industrial Revolution came along.

The fourth Industrial Revolution has accelerated the move towards automation and AI, especially for jobs with high physical proximity (接近). Economist Dr. Carl Frey predicts that at least 40% of current jobs will be lost to automation by 2050.

There are exceptions. Jobs that involve complex social interactions are beyond current robot skills, such as teaching, cleaning jobs, and jobs that rely on creativity, according to Frey and Osborne.

According to McKinsey, those whose work falls outside the caring, cleaning and creative fields will still work in the future, just differently. In about 60% of occupations, it’s estimated that a third of the tasks can be automated, meaning substantial changes to the way we work. A large-scale study carried out by accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted that over the next 20 years, although 7 million jobs will be lost to AI, 7.2 million new ones will be created as a result. So we will work in the future: we just don’t know what we’ll be doing yet.

3 . To save the environment, we must all join in — and nobody knows this better than 70-year-old grandmother Pat Smith who spent 2018 cleaning up litter from 52 beaches in Cornwall on the United Kingdom’s south coast.

Smith set out in January, 2018 to carry out her New Year’s resolution of making her community a better and cleaner place. The ambitious goal came to her after she watched a documentary on plastic pollution the previous year, and she knew she couldn’t just sit by.

Often, volunteers would join her in her efforts, including her grandchildren, or she would join hands with other campaigners such as Wayne Dixon, who is walking around the UK coast as an ambassador for Keep Britain Tidy.

During her beach cleans, Smith was sometimes mistaken for doing community service! She said, “People don’t understand I’ve been doing this voluntarily. We should all take responsibility for picking up the litter as well as ensuring we don’t drop litter in the first place.

Even before her beach cleanups, Smith had begun her first environmental campaign to eliminate plastic straws (吸管) in her city of Cornwall . To date, she has encouraged 600 local companies to stop using unnecessary plastic. In an effort to make her hometown an example for the plastic-free movement in the United Kingdom, she founded The Final Straw Cornwall in the summer of 2017. “I founded the Final Straw to try and raise awareness of the disastrous damage we are doing to our oceans from our casual consumption of single-use plastics. I feel I have a responsibility to my children and grandchildren to do something about it.” She said.

Her resolution year may be over but this environmentally conscious grandma continues her quest (追求). “A lot of the rubbish I’ve picked up consists of everyday items,” said Smith. “These things are used by all of us and it is shocking to find them polluting our beautiful beaches. Please let’s try to be more thoughtful in this coming year. I’m driven to try and protect our living planet for my children and grandchildren and I will continue to do everything in my power to achieve that.”

4 . Nancy was a single mother with two kids and no savings. Desiring work but lacking work ________, Nancy had to answer an ad for a house cleaner. The house was a luxury apartment so she guessed it must be a(n) ________ job. The interview was simple: just clean the whole apartment. Hoping to ________ the house owner, Nancy decided to do the work ________, shining all the wood floors, wiping the hidden places with cleaners, turning over cushions, and washing all the windows. She didn’t even ________ a small corner. Then she found a handful of ________ on the couch and another handful under the bed. A few crumpled (皱的) dollar bills and some coins might not mean much to a man of ________ who could throw his money around ________. But to Nancy and her children, a few dollars would ________ them for a few days. Nancy remembered the ________ from her father: work hard, and be ________. She kept to those words all the time. Then she tried to ________ the paper money and put the coins in neat piles. It was many hours ________ she completed her duty.

The next day, Nancy got the job. It turned out that the scattered money was also a part of the ________. Anybody can clean houses but few can be ________. Nancy made enough money and could raise her family. And as time went by, she was promoted to more important positions. In every task there were the same ________ to be followed: don’t cut corners; check the details everybody else tends to ________. Nancy became a trusted personal assistant because she always ________ these rules.

Earning trust is not that difficult. You choose what is ________ over what is fun, fast, or easy. And you choose to practice your values rather than simply ________ them. They are the key.