Hasta La Gadget!

Life expectancy across the globe has increased by five years since 2000, the fastest rise in lifespans since the 1960s, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

For W magazine, by Caroline Grosso.

Photo: Getty Images.

Pamela Anderson is back! A film reboot of her ’90s TV show Baywatch is due out next year, so get ready for more of those enviable beach running scenes. Luckily, swimsuits with high-cut legs feel brand-new again, so you can channel your inner bombshell lifeguard. Here, 10 sporty options worthy of the original Baywatch babes.

Photo: Courtesy of vendor

1. Oye one-piece, $350, bergdorfgoodman.com.

Photo: Courtesy of vendor

2. Thapelo Paris one-piece with gold buttons, $248, thapelo-paris.com.

Photo: Courtesy of vendor

3. Adriana Degreas bikini, $225, matchesfashion.com.

Photo: Courtesy of vendor

4. Do-Paris swimsuit, $240, do-paris.com.

Photo: Courtesy of vendor

5. Solid & Striped one-piece, $158, bikini.com.

See the rest of 10 Swimsuits That Channel Pamela Anderson in ‘Baywatch’ on Wmagazine.com

More from W Magazine:

Kendall Jenner’s Most Jaw-Dropping Looks

Brad Pitt’s and Angelina Jolie in Domestic Bliss (Photos)

Kim Kardashian Goes Fully Nude in W Magazine

The Biggest Trends in this Fall’s Fashion

Gigi Hadid Is REALLY Well Connected

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

If you want to be emotionally free, there is only one thing you need to understand: whatever problem you think you have right now is not the actual problem. The problem is that you do not know how to think about your problem correctly.

It’s 2016. We’re on the Internet. You’re sick of platitudes. But this isn’t really something you can afford to ignore. This isn’t just advice that may perhaps be applicable to some people, sometimes, in certain situations. It is not just a kind notion that can soothe you on a hard day, it’s not just something you can lean on when you’ve exhausted all other options.

The point of experiencing anything is learning how to think about it differently. When you do not do the work of learning to think differently, you become stuck.

The more we experience, the more capable we are of seeing the world with varied lenses, thinking with more dimension, considering possibilities that were previously inconceivable. Real education is not learning what to think about, but how to think in general.

Learning how to better ignore negative thoughts is not learning how to think, it’s learning how to disassociate. Our negative thoughts inform us as much as positive ones do. Rather than becoming afraid, we can learn to see them as directives, or at the very least, if we can be discerning about what we ascribe meaning to, we can decide what matters to us, and to what degree.

Therein is the power of negative thinking.

As the stoics practiced negative visualization (imagining the worst possible outcomes and then preparing for them) learning how to think is the simple art of recognizing that you choose how you apply meaning and emotion to your life.

And if you don’t consciously decide what matters and what doesn’t, you’ll spend the rest of your life in feeling patterns, responding to what you were conditioned by when you were young.

The solution is not a hyper-focus on positivity (as mainstream pop psych would have you believe) but learning how to turn the shadow aspects of your mind into forces that ignite change and inspire growth.

Emotional freedom, and inner peace, is knowing what to do when those negative thoughts and feelings arise, because they will.

As Jonah Lehrer explains, we regulate our emotions by thinking about them. Our prefrontal cortexes allow us to think about our own minds. Our brains think about themselves. Psychologists call it metacognition.

We know when we are angry, because each feeling state must come with a degree of self-awareness, so we can figure out why we’re feeling what we’re feeling. Without that awareness, we wouldn’t know we are afraid of the lion that’s charging at us in the wild, so we wouldn’t run to escape it. If we didn’t run away, what would be the point of the feeling in the first place?

But more importantly, if a feeling doesn’t make sense – if the amygdala is responding to a “loss frame,” then it can be ignored. “The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain,” that is if it determines there is no merit in ascribing meaning.

What this means is that whatever problem you think you have in your life is not the problem, it’s the fact that you see it as a problem, rather than a signal you refuse to respond to, or a product of over-ascribing meaning, extrapolation, irrational thoughts that created irrational emotions that continue to go unchecked, and so on.

It is the fact that you see the problem as a problem rather than a fallacy in your understanding, your focus, your perception.

The problem is not the problem, it is how you think about the problem.

If you want to function, you have to learn how to think about your feelings. The difference between the kind of anxiety that paralyzes you and the kind of fear that accompanies anything brave and worthwhile is discernment, which takes practice. The difference between the kind of people who turn their obstacles into opportunities and the kind of people who are crushed beneath the weight of their own uncertainty is knowledge, and awareness.

Being uncomfortable forces us to think of options that we wouldn’t have had to imagine before.

It is why heartbreak is crucial to human growth. The the obstacle that becomes the way. The wound through which Rumi claims the light enters. The beautiful people Elisabeth Kübler-Ross says had to know defeat and suffering and struggle to know appreciation and sensitivity and understanding. The pain Khalil Gibran believes sears the most incredible characters’ hearts. The suffering through which Fyodor Dostoyevsky claims a large intelligence and deep heart can be born. The people C. Joybell C. sees as stars: dying until they realize they are collapsing into supernovas, to become more beautiful than ever before.

Any idiot can enjoy the positive things in their lives, but it is only a few that can take the negative and find something even more profound.

This post originally appeared on Soul Anatomy.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Late last week we learned that Personal Income rose at a respectable pace of +0.4% in March, exceeding the consensus estimate of +0.3%. As has become a recurring theme, though, the pace of consumer spending was unable to keep up with the growth in income. Personal Spending rose just +0.1% in March, below the consensus estimate of +0.2%. The net effect? The savings rate rose again, this time to a 13-month high of 5.4%. For the full first quarter of 2016, the savings rate of 5.2% matched the highest level since the fourth quarter of 2012.

We have been talking about the likelihood of a higher savings rate for several years, and we continue to believe that further increases will be a significant drag on economic growth for at least the next several years. Why? Well the quickest explanation is that leading up the financial crisis, the savings rate had fallen far too low relative to historical averages. Since World War Two, the US consumer has saved an average of 8.7% of his Disposable Personal Income (DPI) on an annual basis. That rate fell to a low of 2.6% in 2005 but has since rebounded to 5.1% in 2015 – still well below the long-term average. So the recent increases in saving may simply be that the consumer is compensating for years of profligate spending and under-saving.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)

But simply showing that the savings rate is low relative to history is not a great explanation for why we think the savings rate will continue rising from here. The consumer savings rate can be affected by a number of different variables, including income levels, unemployment rates, housing prices, stock prices, inflation rates, consumer confidence, lending standards (access to credit), gas prices, interest rates, etc. Given that many of these variables have been supportive of consumer spending in recent years, most economists have been somewhat confounded by the recent increases in the savings rate. For example, the unemployment rate has been cut in half, incomes have risen, stock prices have tripled since March, 2009, the housing market has rebounded nicely, inflation is low, confidence has rebounded, lending standards have loosened, and gas prices and interest rates are very low. There is not much in these indicators that would “spook” consumers into saving more. So why the sudden urge to put more aside for a rainy day?

In our view, the most logical explanation is that many of the economic indicators cited above are not an accurate depiction of the typical middle-class family. Most notably, middle-class incomes have risen at a much slower pace than the cost of non-discretionary expenditures, such as health care, education, child care, housing, and yes, saving for retirement (the cost of which goes up as asset prices rise and expected future returns go down). The squeezing of the middle class has been a decades-long trend that shows little sign of reversing. The average American is in precarious financial condition, without the means to address a minor short-term financial emergency much less fund a 30-year retirement. The cover story in this month’s The Atlantic magazine (“The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans”, by Neal Gabler) is just the latest in a long series of news pieces that have shed light on this issue. The entire article can be found at this link: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/.

But let me offer some quotations taken directly from the article:

• The Fed asked respondents (to a national survey it conducted) how they would pay for a400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the400 at all.
• Two reports published last year by the Pew Charitable Trusts found, respectively, that 55 percent of households didn’t have enough liquid savings to replace a month’s worth of lost income, and that of the 56 percent of people who said they’d worried about their finances in the previous year, 71 percent were concerned about having enough money to cover everyday expenses.
• Median net worth has declined steeply in the past generation-down 85.3 percent from 1983 to 2013 for the bottom income quintile, down 63.5 percent for the second-lowest quintile, and down 25.8 percent for the third, or middle, quintile. According to research funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, the inflation-adjusted net worth of the typical household, one at the median point of wealth distribution, was 87,992 in 2003. By 2013, it had declined to54,500, a 38 percent drop. And though the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 certainly contributed to the drop, the decline for the lower quintiles began long before the recession-as early as the mid-1980s, Wolff says.
• …the study by Lusardi, Tufano, and Schneider found that nearly one-quarter of households making 100,000 to 150,000 a year claim not to be able to raise2,000 in a month.
• Real hourly wages-that is, wage rates adjusted for inflation-peaked in 1972; since then, the average hourly wage has essentially been flat. (These figures do not include the value of benefits, which has increased.)
• Though household incomes rose dramatically from 1967 to 2014 for the top quintile (ie, the highest earning one-fifth), and more dramatically still for the top 5 percent, incomes in the bottom three quintiles rose much more gradually: only 23.2 percent for the middle quintile, 13.1 percent for the second-lowest quintile, and 17.8 percent for the bottom quintile. That is over a period of 47 years! But even that minor growth is somewhat misleading. The peak years for income in the bottom three quintiles were 1999 and 2000; incomes have declined overall since then-down 6.9 percent for the middle quintile, 10.8 percent for the second-lowest quintile, and 17.1 percent for the lowest quintile.
• A 2014 analysis by USA Today concluded that the American dream, defined by factors that generally corresponded to the Commerce Department’s middle-class benchmarks, would require an income of just more than130,000 a year for an average family of four. Median family income in 2014 was roughly half that.
• The American Psychological Association conducts a yearly survey on stress in the United States. The 2014 survey-in which 54 percent of Americans said they had just enough or not enough money each month to meet their expenses-found money to be the country’s No. 1 stressor.
• A 2014 New York Times poll found that only 64 percent of Americans said they believed in the American dream-the lowest figure in nearly two decades.

Again, it has become abundantly clear that the large majority of Americans are financially prepared for neither a major crisis nor retirement. Moreover, the big increases in asset prices we’ve seen in recent years (stocks, real estate, bonds), combined with the very low level of interest rates, means that those underprepared Americans will have to set aside more money, not less, in order to reach their retirement and security goals. Unfortunately, this is one cost that the Fed refuses to consider in its assessment of inflation. If we can’t expect to earn the historical 10%+ on stocks and something reasonable like 4%-5% on bonds, then we need to save more, especially if we have deferred the process of saving for retirement until now. Setting aside more for retirement or an emergency is a very real cost that needs to be considered.
As always when I discuss this topic, I ask you to please not mistake this as a political commentary. I am simply trying to shed additional light on the problem as it relates to our future economic growth prospects. A little less than 70% of our economy is comprised of consumer spending, so the consumer’s financial condition is of utmost importance. Possible solutions to the problem are outside the scope of this Market Commentary, but I’ll give you a clue. Congress…get your act together!

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

You’ll likely spend months planning the perfect wedding day — but it’s often the unscripted parts of the day that become the most memorable. These silly moments captured on camera are guaranteed to put a smile on your face.

More from Bridal Guide:

• 50 Wedding Ideas You’ve Never Seen Before
• 100 Ideas for Summer Weddings
• 150+ Ways to Make Your Wedding Unforgettable
• 75 Reasons to Have a First Look
• 50 Cost-Cutting Wedding Swaps

By Kristen Klein for Bridal Guide

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.