👋🏻 Hello friends,

Greetings from Saratoga Springs, NY! I had some significant changes to my plans for the upcoming week, but the silver lining is that we got the opportunity to have our entire family together for the first time in months.

Take it easy and enjoy this week's leisurely Sunday Drive around the internet.

Vibin'‌

The Vibe of the Week is John Mayer's Gravity from 2007. This song means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. To me, it's a song about seeking inner peace. Feels pretty appropriate this week.

💡  Quote of the Week‌

"You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy."
- Jane 'Nightbirde' Marczewski (RIP)

📈  Chart of the Week

This week's Chart shows the increasing magnitude of involvement of central banks around the world over the last several decades. We hear much about the financialization of the global economy. It's not clear if it's the chicken or the egg, but the growth of central bank intervention over time has been a key driver of the increase in the size of the financial sector in our economy.

Interesting Drive-By's

🤔  Is Retirement Bad for your Brain? - This TEDx talk demonstrates how essential it is that we “retire to” something as opposed to “retire from” a job. The team of researchers did an ongoing, longitudinal study of retired people compared to those of the same age who didn’t retire. Ultimately, they found rapid cognitive deterioration amongst the retired set partly because the neuro-connections in their brains became more dormant, which is pretty much intellectual speak for “if you don’t use it, you lose it.” Healthy living (at any age) depends on the connections we make.

💡  The Opportunity Cost of Everything - Every single day, our life is driven by opportunity costs of past, present, and future. While we're not always conscious of it, opportunity costs are at the core of every decision that we make. Decisions themselves are quite literally the inflection point of opportunity where we choose one path over another.

📈  Your Life in Weeks - A sobering view of how a 90-year life looks when laid out in weeks. Carpe Diem!

📉  Is Global Unhappiness Affecting Your Investments? - Great interview with Jon Clifton, the CEO of Gallup Research, discussing his book Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It. It's another example of how important it is that organizations place an appropriate value on their human capital.

🤓  The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence - An interesting interview with Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman About the Democratization of AI. I found the section discussing the deflationary aspects of software automation to be particularly worthwhile.

If you have any cool articles or ideas that might be interesting for future Sunday Drive-by's, please send them along or tweet 'em at me.

‌I hope you have a relaxing weekend and a great week ahead. See you next Sunday...

-Mike‌

If you enjoy the Sunday Drive, I'd be honored if you'd share it with others.‌‌

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