[#정은지#] ⠀ 2025 JEONG EUNJI Birthday Party [A Day Of Life] IN TAIPEI❤️ 📅 10. 25 (토) 6PM (NST) 📍NTU SPORTS CENTER #은지# #EunJi# #에이핑크# #2025JEONGEUNJIBirthdayParty# #A_Day_Of_Life_IN_TAIPEI# #ASIA_TOUR#

[#정은지#] ⠀ 2025 JEONG EUNJI Birthday Party [A Day Of Life] IN SINGAPORE❤️ 📅 10. 17 (금) 7PM (SGT) 📍CAPITOL THEATRE #은지# #EunJi# #에이핑크# #2025JEONGEUNJIBirthdayParty# #A_Day_Of_Life_IN_SINGAPORE# #ASIA_TOUR#

[#정은지#] ⠀ 2025 JEONG EUNJI Birthday Party [A Day Of Life] IN HONG KONG❤️ 📅 10. 1 (수) 6PM (HKT) 📍AXA DREAMLAND (GO PARK, SAI SHA) #은지# #EunJi# #에이핑크# #2025JEONGEUNJIBirthdayParty# #A_Day_Of_Life_IN_HONGKONG# #ASIA_TOUR#

[#정은지#] ⠀ 2025 JEONG EUNJI Birthday Party [A Day Of Life] IN TOKYO 초대장💌 📅 9. 15 (월) 1PM / 6PM (JST) 📍 SHINJUKU PARK TOWER HALL #은지# #EunJi# #에이핑크# #2025JEONGEUNJIBirthdayParty# #A_Day_Of_Life_IN_TOKYO# #ASIA_TOUR#

For years, I believed a higher salary automatically meant a better life. More money. A bigger house. A nicer car. More vacations. More freedom. That was the formula. Work harder. Earn more. Upgrade your life. Simple. Then I actually lived it. I had the job with more responsibility, more pressure, more expectations, and a bigger paycheck. From the outside, it looked like success. People assumed I was doing well because the numbers on paper said I was. But what they didn't see was how exhausted I felt. I would wake up already stressed about the day ahead. My mind never switched off. Work followed me home. Even when I wasn't working, I was thinking about work. Sunday stopped feeling like a day of rest. It became a countdown to Monday. Every notification felt urgent. Every problem felt like it belonged to me. The money was better. My quality of life wasn't. Now my situation is different. The salary is lower than what many people would consider impressive. I don't have a job title that turns heads. But when I finish work, I can actually leave work behind. I can sit with family and be present. I can spend time with friends without checking emails every few minutes. I can enjoy a quiet evening without feeling guilty for not being productive. I laugh more. I sleep better. I feel lighter. And that's when I started questioning something most people never stop to think about: What if the goal isn't to make the most money possible? What if the goal is to build the best life possible? Because money absolutely matters. Anyone pretending it doesn't is being dishonest. Money pays bills. Money creates opportunities. Money provides security. Money can reduce a lot of stress. But after a certain point, every extra dollar seems to come with a question: What am I giving up in exchange for this? More income? Or more anxiety? A bigger house? Or less time at home? A higher salary? Or a life spent constantly recovering from work? That's the part nobody talks about. I still want financial freedom. I still want to own a home. I still want to earn more. But I no longer believe that chasing the highest possible income is automatically the smartest decision. Sometimes the most expensive thing you can lose is your peace of mind. So I'm curious: What's a decision you made in real life? Did you choose more money and more pressure? Or less money and more peace? And looking back now, would you make the same choice again?

Great essay from Sam Harris on the “last time” for everything (from Waking Up App) — transcribed by @bot Many here might not think highly of him any more, but he’s a clear thinker on many subjects — even if you don’t agree on politics. **Transcript — The Last Time (Sam Harris)** [0:00] I'd like you to take a moment to think about all the things in this life that you will experience for the last time. Of course, there will come a day when you will die and then everything will have been done for the last time. [0:15] But long before you die, you will cease to have certain experiences, experiences that you surely take for granted now. If you're a parent, when is the last time you will pick up your child, or tuck her into bed, or read her a story? [0:36] Our youngest daughter still says, aminals instead of animals. And though I'm a stickler for words, I am not correcting her. Each one of those is priceless. Now thinking in this way lends a poignancy to everything, even to things that you don't like. Again, let's say you're a new parent and you're getting woken up several times a night by your baby. That's brutal, but there will be a last time. And knowing that can change your experience in the moment. There's something sweet even about this experience. It's possible that you will miss this. We do everything a finite number of times, and yet we tend to take even beautiful moments for granted. And the rest of the time we're just trying to get through stuff. You're just trying to get to the end of whatever experience you're having. tim urban, who writes this wonderful blog titled @WaitButWhy, often touches this topic. He actually publishes a poster which represents 90 years of life in weeks. Each line has 52 squares, and there are 90 lines on a single page. And the scale is frankly a little alarming to contemplate. Each week is a significant piece of 90 years, and you can put your finger on the current week in your life. You can see where you are, and then of course you realize you have no assurance of how many weeks you have left. Assuming that you have 90 years, certainly 90 good years, is generally not a safe assumption. What you can know, however, is that each time you do something, pleasant or unpleasant, that is one last time you will do it. And there will come a time when you will have done something the final time. And you will rarely know when that is. For instance, I used to love to ski, and I now haven't skied in well over a decade. Will I ever ski again? I have no idea. But I can assure you that the last time I took off my skis, I was not even dimly aware of the possibility that it might be the last time, right? That I might live for many, many more years, and yet this stood a good chance of being the last time I would ever ski. When is the last time you swam in the ocean or went camping? When is the last time you took a walk just to take a walk? As you go about your day today, consider, everything you're doing is like this. Everything represents a finite opportunity to savor your life. On some level, everything is precious, and if it doesn't seem that way, I think you'll find that paying more attention can make it seem that way. Attention really is your true source of wealth, even more than time, right? Because you can waste time being distracted. So this is just to urge you to take a little more care. When you meet someone for the first time and you shake their hand, pay a little more attention. When you thank somebody for something, mean it a little more. Connect with your life. And mindfulness is the tool that allows you to do that, because the only alternative is to be lost in thought And every time you notice that you're lost, that you're distracted by a thought about the past or the future, and you come back, you are training your mind. And it may feel like an effort at first, but eventually it's like continually waking up from a dream. And ask yourself, how much effort does that take?

🍰 BrownDust2 | Lydia’s Birthday 🎉 Happy Birthday to Lydia, the rookie spearman of the new mercenary group! 🎉 “You came at the perfect time! Could you take a look at my journal? See? I wrote ‘Best Day of My Life’ in huge letters right here! Until last year, I was such a fool that I spent my birthday training without even realizing what day it was... But this year, I circled it on the calendar and waited for today! Thanks to your trust, I managed to finish my training with this old wooden spear... And more than anything, I’m being congratulated by someone very precious to me. I’m so, so happy! Thank you!” #HappyBirthday# #Lydia#

No daily prison overcrowding from the Irish Prison Service today, and we're also waiting on the May 2026 summary report (which will show non-Irish prisoners and Top-5 nationalities). Meanwhile, schoolteacher Enoch Burke (32) has now spent 721 days of his life in prison - 611 in Mountjoy & 110 in Castlerea prison, 20 hours a day in a cell for his peaceful (albeit unlawful) protest after being forced to treat a 15-year old boy as a girl.

WARNING: Emotional post (but worth reading or bookmarking for later). Time is cruel. But that cruelty carries the seeds of beauty. Last weekend, my family and I made our annual pilgrimage to a small community in northwest Connecticut. We started going when I was 18 months old. I met my two best friends there. I caught my first fish there. I had my first crush there. But perhaps most importantly, I played my first game of catch there. As I remember it, I was probably about five years old. My dad had a softball and a couple of old baseball gloves. And there, in the tall, overgrown grass, we threw the ball back and forth. As the years wore on, I got bigger and the ball started moving faster. We played catch damn near every single day when I was a kid. It didn't really matter what time of year or what time of day. We'd play catch in the snow in January. In the early morning light before school. In the dim light of the evenings when he got home from work. In high school, when I started getting college scholarship offers, we played catch. While on the team at Stanford, when my family went on vacation, we played catch. But then, my career ended. And with it, our game of catch. Time is a funny thing. Usually, it goes unnoticed. It exists, but not really. Only in some abstract sense. It flows under the surface. Adjacent to your reality, but not exactly in it. The routines of life make it go faster. You settle into patterns. Paths with gravity. You take a job. You establish a place. You start a family. The days start blending together. They become weeks, months, years, even decades. But then, something breaks. There's some collision. Suddenly, time gets thrust to the surface. Time goes unnoticed, until it's the only thing you notice. I've felt that most painfully with my parents. My dad is 70 now. In some ways, that 70-year-old version feels like a stranger to me. I think the image we have of our parents never really changes from the one we establish as kids. I still see my dad as the young, vibrant, athletic young man. The one who could hit the ball farther than anyone I knew. The one who could toss me up on his shoulders in a flash. The one who could beat me in a race (but usually let me win). I still see that young dad in his eyes, in his energy, in his curiosity for life. In some painful sense, I imagine the 70-year-old version feels like a stranger to him, too. Time is cruel. But that cruelty carries the seeds of beauty. The most beautiful things in life are made beautiful by their impermanence. So, what are we to do about all of this? Perhaps we must simply give in to time. Embrace its unending, relentless flow. Live as we are. Do as we can. But what if, in truth, we have a bit more power than that? What if it's possible, in some imperfect, impermanent way, to control time? To bend time and space. To really be there. To really feel it. To embrace it, without giving in to it. To live as we want. To do as we dream. That theory is what brings me back to last Sunday, when I felt compelled to unlock one of the old cabinets in my parent's cottage. It was a cabinet that, when opened, had the feel of a time capsule. Dust and cobwebs everywhere. A musty smell. Like reaching into it was reaching back in time. I pulled out my old baseball glove. And my dad's old catcher's mitt. I walked outside, where I found my dad playing with his grandsons on the swings. I held up the two gloves, a smile across my face. "Hey, Dad, wanna have a catch?" I smiled. He smiled. We walked side by side out onto the field. And there, in the tall, overgrown grass, we threw the ball back and forth. As we did, something amazing happened. Time melted away. 30 years disappeared. He wasn't 70. I wasn't 35. I was that little boy again. And he was my young dad. Just playing catch for no purpose at all. It was just a game of catch. But it was so much more.