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Kostenlos Frei, Вулиця Братиславська, 11, Kyiv (2026)

18/05/2022

The link between imposter syndrome and burnout
Feeling like you’re bad at your job is miserable. Worse, it’s also more likely to lead to professional burnout.
“People seem to think I'm doing OK, but I really don’t think I am,” says Fiona, a senior manager in her 40s, working in the construction industry in the UK. “You’re always thinking you could be doing better, and that people must be doubting you.”

Fiona, who has been granted anonymity to protect her professional reputation, has spent her career battling imposter syndrome: the fear she doesn’t truly deserve her success. “Despite the fact I’ve got to the position I’m in, I still don’t believe in myself. Other people seem to, but I just don’t feel it’s warranted,” she says.

The stress of constantly questioning herself has been compounded by the anxieties of the pandemic and the pressure of remote working, leaving Fiona feeling “exhausted on a daily basis”.

Now, with sky-high demand in her industry, she feels she’s showing all the symptoms of burnout. She feels emotionally depleted, and has started to “question the whole point of work” and the value she brings “when other people do the job so much better”.

16/05/2022

The 'can do' attitude that defines Hong Kong
Many of Hong Kong's 7.4 million residents remain proud of their "Lion Rock Spirit": a collective determination to better their lives against seemingly insurmountable odds.
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Many societies flatter themselves with tales of a core value supposedly in their DNA. The British have their so-called "Blitz Spirit", a teeth-gritted resolve said to have been shared by people during Germany's intensive bombing campaign of World War II. Americans, meanwhile, are always keen for personal improvement, as promised by the "American Dream".

On the other side of the planet, many of Hong Kong's 7.4 million people also take pride in an intangible quality that they claim as their own. The "Lion Rock Spirit" – which describes their collective determination to better their lives against seemingly insurmountable odds – is, believers say, hardwired in the Asian city.

After all, many older Hong Kongers arrived in the tiny territory on China's southern coast as refugees with nothing, fleeing from turmoil in mainland China between the 1930s and '60s when Hong Kong was still a British colony. It was their resilience and hard work, they insist, that transformed their city into a global financial centre in just one generation.

"We all had to work hard back then," said Chan, an elderly man I met outside a sprawling Hong Kong public housing estate. "If you did not, you would go hungry, your children would be hungry. Everyone was working hard for their future."

"The Lion Rock Spirit was a common belief in my parent's generation," said Bryony Hardy-Wong, whose mother and father arrived from China in the 1960s, and who was brought up on a similar housing estate. "Most of them were coming from humble backgrounds. What they believed was to work hard, and then they could win the opportunities to climb up the social ladder."

12/05/2022

Eight nature books to change your life
Is it possible to reboot or 're-wild' our minds by living a slower, more feral existence in harmony with nature? Lindsay Baker speaks to the authors who think we can.
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The movement towards rural living in the western world seems to be a sign of the times, with an exodus from urban life, and people seeking a rustic idyll, a simpler existence – and in some cases embracing the idea of "slow living", an antidote to fast hustle culture. And the lure of rural life is inevitably even more acute in spring and summer, when there is a sense of renewal and expectation in the air, and as, the poet Philip Larkin famously put it: "The trees are coming into leaf/ Like something almost being said".

It's no surprise, then, that the theme for the US's Mental Health Month this year is "back to basics". In fact, increasing numbers of people are responding to burnout and the stresses of modern life by moving completely off-grid, in what has been described as "extreme wilding". In an attempt to reset their lives and their expectations of life, they are going beyond the cottage-core notion of a cosy, tidy garden and a cute, nostalgic rural aesthetic, and are placing themselves in truly remote and rugged landscapes.

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The sense that a close connection with nature can be life – and mind – changing is shared by a number of recent books. The idea of re-wilding is familiar, with many reforestation projects and the re-introduction of endemic flora and fauna happening across the globe, helping to restore eco-systems and reverse some of the damage done to wild environments. But in a moment when mental health problems are rife, and as we start to emerge from the worst pandemic the world has known for a century, the term rewilding is now being used in a new way.

11/05/2022

The office spaces transforming into luxury apartments
As remote work has left many offices empty, developers are turning these spaces into private homes – hopefully reviving dying business districts as the same time.
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When The Wray opened in Washington, DC’s fashionable Foggy Bottom neighbourhood in May 2021, it was one of the buzziest real-estate projects of the year. Not only did the eight-storey apartment complex have bold Art Deco designs in its grand lobby, but also a rooftop terrace overlooking the DC skyline with fire pits and grills as well as a penthouse clubroom with a lounge and private meeting space.

For residents of the neighbourhood, it was quite a surprise to see this World War Two-era building transformed into 158 luxury apartments. It was, after all, filled just two years earlier with foreign-policy makers dissecting diplomatic cables at offices run by the US State Department.

The Wray is just one of several work buildings in the Washington DC area that have been adapted into residential space. According to a recent report from rental listings site RentCafe, the US capital has converted more offices to housing since the start of the pandemic than anywhere else in the nation, with 1,091 new units. Neighbouring city Alexandria, Virginia, meanwhile, is right behind with 955 new units.

10/05/2022

Buenos Aires' unusual pizza topping
A century ago, Italian immigrants in Argentina's capital gave pizza an unusual new topping: a chickpea pancake known as "fainá".
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At a bustling counter inside Güerrín, a central Buenos Aires pizzeria, a young server in a red-and-white uniform dished out slices. Laid out before him was an abundance of thick, golden pizzas, their toppings a bright blend of green olives, red peppers and crispy melted cheese. The queue reached almost to the door, as he cut the portions with movements as lean and efficient as a juggler, the wedges disappearing in minutes.

Every so often, he turned to a stack of what look like crumbly pieces of pizza base and flicked a portion onto a slice as he served it. The result looked like a pizza sandwich, the mozzarella melting slowly out from between the layers. This extra topping isn't actually from pizza at all but a thick, baked chickpea pancake called fainá.

Made from just chickpea flour, water, oil, salt and pepper, fainá is not complicated. At one of the restaurant's enormous ovens, I watched as a chef whisked the ingredients into a dribbly batter, poured it into a flat, round metal pan and carefully pushed it into the oven on a long, metal peel. Over the next five minutes or so, large bubbles pulsated on the surface. In the back corner, a blazing log fire heated the oven to almost 400C. The whole kitchen was sweltering and the aroma of baking suffused the air. When the fainá came out of the oven, it was golden-yellow with dark patches, like a harvest Moon. It would serve 20 to 30 people.

07/05/2022

'Cottagecore' and the rise of the modern rural fantasy
How did a bucolic dreamland became the perfect escape from real life? Anita Rao Kashi explores a whimsical world of nostalgia, tranquillity and folksy mysticism.
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A few weeks into lockdowns everywhere, a curious thing happened on Instagram feeds. More and more, they filled with images of pretty cottages adorned with climbers and flower-laden trellises, soft-focus sunbeams streaming through dense foliage, dappled wooded pathways and earthy mushrooms growing in abandon, tea tables and picnics in shaded gardens near gurgling streams laden with homemade sourdough bread and scones, soft cotton dresses with smocking and embroidered with strawberries and butterflies... part surreal, part escapist fantasy from the horrors around, and partly about taking control. The phenomenon had a hashtag – . It's a trend that has slowly become the standout aesthetic of the year 2020. Much like Scandinavian concepts hygge and friluftsliv, the pastoral aesthetic of cottagecore is striking a chord.

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Of course, nothing trends like a concept that is embraced by a high-profile celebrity. A few months ago, Taylor Swift released her album Folklore. The promotional pictures showed her in a woodsy setting, de-glamourised and in a cosy overcoat. The album had a raw, earthy, nostalgic energy, which toggled between simplicity, cosiness, and escapism. The perfect word salad to describe cottagecore. In one fell swoop, a fringe aesthetic catapulted into the mainstream.

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