Hidden health, freelance gold, and the case for boredom

🌱 HEALTHY

You're Measuring The Wrong Things

Most of us track the same stuff. Steps. Calories. Bodyweight. Hours of sleep logged on a wearable.

And none of it tells you whether you actually feel good.

You can hit 10,000 steps, stay in a calorie deficit, and still be sleep-deprived, lonely, and stressed out of your mind. Those things drive worse long-term health outcomes than a missed workout ever will.

The metrics we obsess over are inputs. Not outcomes.

What actually predicts whether your life feels healthy and sustainable are the things that don't fit on a watch face. Peace of mind. Daily energy levels. The quality of your relationships.

Global wellbeing research backs this up. Positive daily emotions and subjective peace correlate with longer life expectancy and better overall health, not just good biometric scores. People who report feeling calm, connected, and supported consistently show better health outcomes than people who are hitting their numbers but running on empty.

The problem is these things are harder to measure so we ignore them and default to what's easy to count.

A simple fix is a daily 1-10 check-in across three areas. How calm do I feel today? How's my energy? Did I feel connected to people I care about? That's it. No app needed.

Do it for a few weeks and patterns start showing up. You'll notice when chasing a fitness goal tanks your sleep or mood. You'll see which weeks felt genuinely good versus which ones just looked productive on paper.

A genuinely healthy life is one where the visible metrics follow from the invisible ones. Not the other way around.

Takeaway: This week, run a simple daily check-in. Rate your peace, energy, and connection out of 10 each day. At the end of the week, look at which days scored highest and what was different about them.

🪙 WEALTHY

The Freelance Market Is Getting Bigger

Remote freelance job postings grew 22% in just six months according to FlexJobs' latest report. More than 72 million Americans now work independently, with projections hitting 86 million by 2027.

This isn't a vibe. It's becoming how work gets done.

Companies are shifting from occasional outsourcing to freelance as a default model. Instead of hiring full-time, they're assembling teams of part-time specialists and paying for outcomes instead of hours.

Where the growth actually is:

The strongest demand right now sits in specialised digital skills. AI-assisted content, data and analytics, marketing automation, product design. Companies are buying expertise they don't have in-house rather than growing headcount.

Async-friendly roles are also booming. Writing, editing, product operations, community management, customer support. Anything that can be done in documents, tickets, or code. Firms report equal or better productivity with distributed freelance teams, which keeps pushing more work in this direction.

The other shift worth knowing about is outcome-based pricing. Per project, per funnel, per content series. Data suggests this model earns freelancers more than hourly billing, and clients are increasingly preferring it too.

How to position yourself in this market:

Generic freelancers are getting commoditised fast. The ones doing well sell outcomes in a niche. "I help X type of business achieve Y result" beats "I'm a writer" every time.

Portfolio matters too. Case studies showing you work with AI tools, async systems, and remote teams are disproportionately attractive right now as companies adopt more tech-enabled workflows.

And the smartest play is stacking income streams. Client work combined with a product, newsletter, or course is becoming the standard model for independent remote workers, not the exception.

Takeaway: If you're freelancing or thinking about it, pick one niche and one outcome you deliver. Reframe how you describe your work around that this week. Then look at where you could add a second income stream that doesn't depend on trading hours for money.

📚 AND WISE

Boredom Is a Feature, Not a Bug

We've basically engineered boredom out of existence. Queue at the coffee shop? Phone. Waiting for a flight? Phone. Lying in bed and not immediately tired? Phone.

Every gap gets filled. Every quiet moment gets killed.

The problem is that boredom isn't just discomfort. Research shows it's actually the brain shifting into a mode that drives creativity, reflection, and problem solving. That slightly restless, under-stimulated feeling is your mind telling you it's ready to make connections. We just never let it.

Studies where people were deliberately given boring tasks beforehand consistently showed better performance on creative thinking afterwards. The gap is where ideas form. We've just stopped leaving any.

It's not even that we're replacing boredom with something better. Heavy phone use fragments attention and actually increases a kind of restless, dissatisfied boredom, the worst kind, where you feel bored but can't sit still long enough to get anywhere useful.

The fix isn't dramatic. It's just protecting a few empty slots in your day. Walk without headphones. Shower without a podcast queued up. Sit in a queue without reaching for your pocket.

Your best ideas probably aren't going to come from a YouTube video. They're going to come from a Tuesday afternoon when nothing interesting was happening.

Takeaway: Pick one thing you do every day where you normally reach for your phone and go without it this week. Just one. See what shows up.