Hi,

Welcome to the Procrastilearning Newsletter, where your time is well spent even though you should probably be doing something else.

3 things worth procrastilearning over

1. Talking more than one language makes you age more slowly

A recent study in Nature dropped a linguistic bombshell: speaking multiple languages might actually slow down your biological clock. Researchers checked over 86,000 healthy Europeans aged 51-91 across 27 countries, using fancy AI 'aging clocks' that track health markers like cognition, grip strength and chronic conditions. The verdict? Monolinguals were twice as likely to show accelerated aging signs compared to multilingual people, with the benefits even scaling up the more languages you juggle - bilinguals got a solid boost, but polyglots pulled ahead even further.

It's not just about staving off dementia. It's a shield against overall decline, holding steady even after factoring in education, exercise and social vibes. As a bilingual person knee-deep in English-Polish projects (and dabbling in Spanish in my free time), this made my day, as you can imagine - it seems my brain's getting a free upgrade while I do my work.

The general takeaway is clear: load up Duolingo, because that green owl might keep you sharper for longer.

2. Scientists are creating 'mirror' versions of life that might kill us all

It sounds like absurd science fiction but mirror life is what you get when you rebuild biology backwards: right-handed amino acids, left-handed sugars, the whole molecular cabinet mirrored. Scientists are already assembling pieces of this puzzle, nudging it from sci‑fi thought experiment into 'this might actually exist in a couple of decades' territory.

The terrifying bit is that the resulting organisms would be largely invisible to our usual safeguards: our enzymes can’t chew them up, our viruses can’t infect them, our immune systems would probably just shrug. Once you start learning more about it, it has the same vibe as all the AI doom talk, where people imagine a system that slips past all our safeguards, except this time it’s not runaway software but runaway biochemistry.

There are, of course, heroic use-cases that the scientists argue make this worthwhile pursuing: longer-lasting drugs, virus-proof biomanufacturing, neatly fenced-off mirror ecosystems. But the more synthetic biologists talk about 'orthogonal life', whatever that means, the more it sounds like they are pitching the apocalypse: uncontrollable mirror images of ourselves that live in a kind of biochemical negative space.

It reminds me of the old Poltergeist horror movies from the 80s and 90s with all those evil ghosts living in the household’s mirrors…. So let's pick something lighter for our third topic today, shall we? 😅

3. Women having pockets is controversial

I’ve often wondered why the pockets on my wife's clothes are usually sewn up and useless. Once you notice that your phone, keys and purse will not fit into most women’s trousers without either falling out or destroying the silhouette, it becomes hard to unsee how often 'Well, just carry a handbag' has been baked into default expectations for women.

Meanwhile, men like me stagger around like overpacked donkeys in my cargo shorts and camo trousers with six pockets. Nobody’s suggesting I should switch to a cute designer accessory (except maybe my wife, since she hates cargo trousers).

Historically, women actually had pockets in the past, but they lost them as fashion began prioritising slim silhouettes and the assumption that anything important could live in a separate bag instead. Even now, studies show women’s pockets are on average almost half the size of men’s, which makes no sense since we're all expected to carry brick-sized smartphones. If you fancy going down a pocket-sized rabbit hole of feminist history, the BBC has a fascinating overview here.

2 quotes to keep in mind

1 simple tip for reducing your doctor visits

Write down something you're grateful for every day.

Turns out, your inner grump might be quietly sabotaging your health habits. In one famous experiment, people were split into groups: some wrote regularly about things they were grateful for, others focused on daily hassles and annoyances. Over several weeks, the gratitude group didn’t just feel better – they actually exercised more and ended up visiting the doctor less often than the 'negative focus' group, who spent their time mentally replaying everything that went wrong.​

What’s sneaky about this is that on the surface it doesn't seem like you're doing something for your physical health – it’s just writing a few lines about good things in your life. But that small shift in attention seems to somehow ripple outward into behaviour: more movement, better self-care, fewer health complaints. Gratitude isn’t magic and won’t replace a GP, but as a low-effort practice you can do lying down, it’s oddly powerful and worth trying: jot down three things you’re thankful for right now. Then do the same tomorrow. And repeat.

That's all for today. Many thanks for reading.

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning on Beehiiv / More stuff

Sent this by somebody else?