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For many people, the word sabbatical conjures a very specific image: a long break from work, perhaps time spent on a beautiful beach, maybe a few weeks of rest before returning recharged. Its often perceived as indulgent, impractical, or reserved for academics and executives with generous benefits. That image misses the point. A sabbatical isnt a more extended vacation. It isnt an escape from responsibility. And paradoxically, it isnt even primarily about rest. When well executed, a sabbatical is a deliberate interruption that creates the conditions for identity discovery, integration, and renewal. When done poorly, it can leave people just as disoriented as when they left, only with some good photos. Theres growing evidence that intentional time away can meaningfully change how people think, work, and relate to their lives. Research published in Harvard Business Review shows that extended breaks can improve creativity, strategic thinking, and long-term performance when paired with reflection and learning, rather than pure disengagement. Neuroscience research on insight and learning also suggests that novelty, reflection, and reduced cognitive load are essential for sustainable change, not merely rest alone. Weve seen this firsthand, not only in our own travels and explorations, but in the leaders, founders, and creatives we work with. The difference between a sabbatical that changes someones trajectory and one that simply delays burnout has little to do with duration and everything to do with intention. The Sabbatical Paradox Theres a paradox at the heart of meaningful sabbaticals: sometimes we have to step away from our lives to find ourselves inside them. Modern professional life has a quiet way of narrowing identity to fit a job description. Over time, we become knownand rewardedfor our role, capabilities, or reputation. What begins as focus slowly becomes constraint. The narrowing works, until one day it doesnt. Most people dont notice whats been edited out along the way. Not because it disappeared, but because the environments we move through every day no longer reflect it back to us. A sabbatical introduces distance from those mirrors. Stepping away from job titles, expectations, and familiar routines creates a kind of productive disorientation. Without constant reinforcement of who we are supposed to be, something else begins to surface: questions we didnt have time to ask, interests we parked years ago, capacities that never quite fit our professional containers but never stopped calling for expression. This is why sabbaticals often feel unsettling before they feel liberating. They interrupt identity before they clarify it. The discomfort isnt a sign that something is wrong; its evidence that something deeper is loosening. Integration comes later, but only after we allow the disruption to do its work. Why So Many Sabbaticals Fail The most common sabbatical myth is that time alone does the work. It doesnt. Weve met people who took months off only to return unchanged; rested, perhaps, but no clearer about what they wanted next. One senior leader I worked with stepped away for nearly a year, spending the time traveling and in downtime, assuming clarity would eventually arrive. Instead, the absence of structure amplified anxiety. By the time he returned, he felt disconnected from his previous role but equally unprepared to move forward. Yes, you can fail a sabbatical. Failure usually happens when the pause is treated as an absence rather than a practice; when theres no intention beyond getting away, when reflection is optional, when the use of time is accidental rather than designed, or when people expect certainty to arrive without first sitting with uncertainty. A meaningful sabbatical asks something of you. It requires participation, not just permission. Designing a Sabbatical That Actually Matters A powerful sabbatical, whether its three months or three intentional weeks, has a shape to it. It begins with a question, not a destination. Not Where should I go? but What part of myself needs space right now? Sometimes the answer is exhaustion. Sometimes its curiosity. Sometimes its a quiet knowing that the way youve been operating is no longer sustainable. From there, exposure matters. New cultures, unfamiliar languages, and different rhythms of life interrupt habitual thinking. Travel isnt essential, but dislocation often is. Being outside your comfort zone has a way of revealing whats essential and whats been propping you up. Equally important is capture. Insight has a short half-life. Without practices for noticing and recording what youre learningthrough writing, sketching, voice notes, or conversationmuch of the value evaporates on reentry. The sabbatical becomes a memory instead of a resource. And then theres skill-building. The most impactful sabbaticals dont just create space; they develop new muscles. Learning a language, navigating unfamiliar systems, volunteering, or studying a craft can rewire confidence and expand identity in ways rest alone never will. Annettes experience reflects this clearly. During her second sabbatical, focused on purpose-seeking both personally and professionally, she adopted a simple daily practice: creating one sketch each day alongside her morning journaling. The practice slowed her thinking, surfaced patterns, and helped her make sense of complexity beyond words alone. What began as a sabbatical experiment became a lasting integration practice she continues to use to capture insight, navigate uncertainty, and connect more deeply with others. When You Cant Take a Sabbatical, Design a Powerful Pause Not everyone can step away for months, and thats understandable. But skipping the process entirely comes at a cost. A powerful pause can be designed within real constraints: a few weeks between roles, a recurring solo day each month, or even a temporary relocation layered inside your current workflow. What matters isnt the length of time away, but the quality of separation and reflection. We have seen leaders design micro-sabbaticals that changed everything, not because they escaped their lives, but because they stopped rushing through them. They created containers for asking better questions, experimenting with new rhythms, and noticing who they were becoming when performance pressure loosened its grip. The same principles apply: intention, exposure, capture, and learning. The Role of Uncertainty Another common misconception is that a sabbatical should always provide clarity upon completion. Sometimes it does. Often, it delivers something more valuable first: disruption. Plans unravel. New paths appear. Identities loosen before they reassemble. This isnt failure; its the work. A sabbatical creates a liminal space where old narratives lose authority, and new ones havent fully formed. Being open to that uncertainty is part of designing a successful pause. The goal isnt to come back with all the answers. Its to return more integrated, more honest, and more attuned to what matters. At their best, sabbaticals deepen connection to ourselves, to others, and to purpose. They remind us that we are larger than our rols and more capable than our routines suggest. They create space for identity integration rather than identity performance. In a culture obsessed with acceleration, choosing to pauseintentionally, courageously, and with curiosityis a radical act. Whether you call it a sabbatical or a powerful pause, the invitation is the same: step far enough away from your life to see it clearly, and long enough into yourself to decide how you want to return. Because the most meaningful journeys dont just take us somewhere new, they bring us back to ourselves, changed.
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E-Commerce
Rarely have I more appreciated the chasm between me and Silicon Valley than I have while using OpenClaw. This new AI program, which previously went by Moltbot and before that Clawdbot, has achieved virality over the past week for its ability to control your digital life via text message. It’s an unashamedly geeky tool at the moment, but those who’ve been using it have hailed it as the future of digital assistants. There’s just one problem: OpenClaw is exorbitantly expensive to use. Okay, maybe not for the AI boosters who think nothing of dropping $200 per month on ChatGPT Pro or Claude Max. But definitely for me as someone who balks at even a $20 per month AI subscription. Continuing to use OpenClaw would cost me a lot more than that, which isn’t worth the time it saves on a handful of menial tasks. What is Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw? OpenClaw isn’t like other AI tools that you access in a web browser or mobile app. Instead, you set it up on your computer via command line instructions and plug it into existing AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. As long as your machine stays on, its available. [Screenshot: Jared Newman] Much of what OpenClaw does is similar to existing AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude. It can answer questions, browse the web, and connect with an array of third-party services, including your email and calendar. But it also does a few key things differently: It can access anything on your computer. You can access it through popular chat services such as WhatsApp and iMessage. Because it’s always running, it can proactively message you and run tasks automatically. Like a lot of AI tools, OpenClaw is ultimately what you make of it. And while I’m not the most inventive AI user, I quickly found a few ways in which it could be more useful than conventional AI assistants. For instance, I gave OpenClaw access to my weekly to-do list board in Obsidian, which allowed it to summarize my agenda, add new items to the list, and remove or rearrange existing items. I could do all this just by dictating into a WhatsApp message. I also had OpenClaw handle the tedium of invoicing. After pointing out an existing invoice in my Obsidian vault, I asked it to create a copy and turn it into a new invoice based on a block of text from my FastCo author page. [Screenshot: Jared Newman] From there I started playing with OpenClaw’s scheduling abilities. I asked it to create a 9 a.m. roundup of Techmeme headlines that focused on consumer news and skipped over things like earnings reports and personnel changes. Then I had it set up a bi-hourly digest of a few different subreddits, thereby discouraging me from compulsively checking them during work hours. [Screenshot: Jared Newman] At this point I was feeling pretty good about what OpenClaw could do, and was even looking forward to thinking up more ideas. Then I realized how much it would cost to keep using it. Cost creep Although OpenClaw uses major AI models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, it doesn’t tie into their consumer-facing products. Instead, you must connect with those companies’ developer APIs, whose pay-as-you-go model charges for every query. A couple years ago, when I dabbled in those APIs to generate playlists in Plexamp, each request cost a fraction of a penny. Using OpenClaw is wildly more expensive, especially if you opt for Anthropics Opus 4.5 model, as the developer recommends. Just getting OpenClaw set up cost me about $4, because I didnt trust it with access to my entire file system given the significant security concerns involved . Setting up OpenClaws sandbox mode, which lets you choose which folders it can access, took some back-and-forth troubleshooting. By the time I’d set up my other automations, I was already about $10 deep. If those were just one-time costs, I wouldn’t have cared too much. But every time I asked OpenClaw anything, I’d see a surprising leap on Claude API cost chart. Just asking why a particular story was excluded from its morning Techmeme roundup, for instance, cost $0.64. Confirming which language model OpenClaw was using cost another $0.37. Those fractions of a penny snowballed. Eventually I decided to ask OpenClaw why it was so pricey, which revealed part of the problem: Each query was drawing on our entire conversation as contextincluding my initial sandboxing setupand that gets expensive. (It may have also explained the occasional rate limit errors I was getting in response to some queries.) “Either accept it (continuity has a cost) or periodically start fresh when we switch contexts,” OpenClaws AI informed me. Ultimately, I did wipe OpenClaw’s memory, which meant I had to teach it my to-do list and digest tasks all over again. I also switched from Claude Opus 4.5 to Claude Sonnet 4.5, which is cheaper, as some users have noted. Even with those changes, the costs added up quickly. Managing my to-do list cost about five cents. Delivering my daily Techmeme digest cost about 10 cents. The bihourly Reddit briefings cost about 20 cents. It doesn’t sound like much, but it puts me on track to spend over $30 per month, and that’s without even bothering to give OpenClaw any new tasks or ask it any extra questions. Again, the AI enthusiasts in Silicon Valley might shrug off such costs, but it’s more than I care to spend on any individual service, let alone one that’s only providing a few modest conveniences. What I’ve learned OpenClaw’s overnight fame has at least proven a few things: Interacting with AI via an existing messaging app can be pretty neat if it’s useful enough, especially when it can can reach out proactively. Giving AI access to your computer also opens up some interesting possibilities (but also some serious security risks). For me, though, the biggest takeaway is how much this stuff actually costs when it’s not being subsidized by venture capital or being given away by a big tech company in growth mode. OpenClaw is the rare AI product that actually seems sustainable. But unless the economics of AI API access change, mass adoption may escape its grasp.
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E-Commerce
Record cold temperatures are once again expected to hit a swath of the country this weekendeven plunging Florida into its coldest stretch of the last 15 years, potentially bringing snow to areas of the state that haven’t seen it in four decades. This arctic blast is actually a sign of climate change, and how more extreme weather happens in an increasingly warming world, despite erroneous claims by the president and others. Theres a difference between weather and climate Ahead of the winter storm that brought intense snow, ice, and freezing temperatures to about two-thirds of the United States earlier this month, President Trump took to Truth Social to repeat a common piece of climate misinformation. Record Cold Wave expected to hit 40 states. Rarely seen anything like it before, he wrote. Could the Environmental Insurrectionals please explain WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING??? Trump repeated this sentiment in a recent speech. But his comments reveal a deep misunderstanding about climate change. There is a difference between weather and climate. Weather is short, variable, and has to do with the current conditions in any place at a specific time. Climate, on the other hand, has to do with long-term trends and patterns. As climate change worsens and the planet warms, it leads to trends of hotter and hotter years. But it also exacerbates weather extremes. Climate change also specifically destabilizes the polar vortex, which then brings arctic air and freezing temperatures further south than usual. What is the polar vortex? Swirling around the Arctic above the North Pole is the polar vortex, a large mass of cold, fast winds. Typically, the polar vortex is pretty fixed in terms of its shape and reach: it sits as a band above the top of the planet, like a hat made of cold, low-pressure air. The Arctic is the fastest warming region of the planet, and as it warms, it throws the polar vortex out of whack. [Graphic: AFP/Getty Images] Underneath the polar vortex is the polar jet stream, a river of air that sits closer to the Earths surface and affects our winter weather. As climate change disrupts and destabilizes the polar vortex, it causes it to wobble and distort out of shape. That in turn affects the polar jet stream. Instead of blowing its cold winds straight across the Earth, the jet stream turns wavy, curving up and down and bringing storms and frigid Arctic air further south than usual. Thats what is expected to bring dangerously cold temperatures to much of the country this weekend. Overall, our winters are still getting warmer. On average, 210 locations around the U.S. now experience six more extremely warm days than they did in the 1970s. A warmer atmosphere also holds more precipitation, which can even mean more snow. And generally, climate change fuels all sorts of extremesfrom more intense hurricanes to hotter heat waves to, yes, more severe winter storms.
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E-Commerce
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