Long before we humans existed, the lonely Earth cooled and the sun shone upon it until one day, Hallelujah, life strikes up out of the soup.

Three and a half billion years later here we are with the tools we've fashioned to make things easier for ourselves: Super computers and AI and UberEats and everything we could possibly want just the click of a button away. We've made art, built civilizations, unfurled the mysteries of the cosmos, and hell . . . didn't we make it all the way to the moon! And all because the sun was shining down upon us.

That's what makes what has happened in the last half-century so dispiriting. We've pushed life on Earth and squeezed it and expanded it and now we're destroying it.

How did things go from that to this? The Earth's simple gift of abundant sunshine to the takers we have become — voracious marauders who can't stop consuming, can't stop spewing carbon into the atmosphere, can't stop producing waste?

Frederich Hunterwasser's quote says it all. The history of our species in eight words. What came next is on us: the tragic coda of how we mucked it all up.

— KL

We give birth to a new political party so audacious, so fucking radical and exciting that it whacks America — and maybe the world — into a new orbit.

Swear off clocks.

Instead, tune in to the rhythms of the turning world. Locate yourself in space and time by the feeling you get when you look up at the sky, by the sound of birdsong in the morning. And, later in the day, by the mood of the people around you.

Then slow down. Whenever you're even a little overextended, insert a sacred pause, a micro-Sabbath, right there in your day.

Then declutter. Get rid of your car, your dishwasher, your air conditioner, your electric can opener. Not all at once: take your time. Do it bit by bit when it feels right to make those edits to your life.

Then stop visiting supermarkets and go radically local instead.

Then wean yourself off your phone till you're only on it for a tiny fraction of every day — be more present than ever.

Sounds crazy I know. But is it any crazier than what's happening to us right now — most of us half-assing our way through life with weak stabs at change that don't cut the sadness and anxiety one bit?

Think of the all-in as Plan B — because Plan A isn't working so well — a last-ditch attempt to yank yourself out of the corpo-consumer-capitalist death machine before it totally engulfs you.

OUR PROMISE TO YOU:

We'll hire the most decent, smart and competent humans to run every leadership position in every government department. We'll make being a civil servant one of the most prestigious and desirable jobs any young person could ever aspire to — a values-based calling.

We'll make sure that every court case wraps up within a year. Same with health care: no civilized country makes its citizens suffer waiting interminably to be attended to.

Trump fired 300,000 federal workers; we go in the opposite direction, we'll hire a million and make it work.

Don't think this can't be done. The fact is that it's never really been tried.

Any party that gives this kind of intimate person-to-person service to its citizens — and does it well — is sure to win the next election.

Hot off the press is the newest report of the Global Flourishing Study — an ongoing project managed by Harvard and Baylor which checks in with hundreds of thousands of folks in 22 countries to see how they're doing. "Flourishing" might best be described as truly crushing this thing called life. You're happy, you're healthy, you're at peace. Once again this year, the Scandinavian countries came out on top.

The big surprise was who came out on the bottom: Japan, the UK, and the United States. Countries with among the highest GDP in the world.

WTF?