In his essay on building a life you love, poet and illustrator Jason McBride stresses that fulfillment starts with what he calls “radical responsibility.” That means owning every part of your life, even the circumstances you didn’t create. Most of what happens will be outside your control, but you can decide how you respond, focus on what you can shape, and refuse to live as a permanent victim of circumstance. When three of his freelance writing clients dropped him in the same week — two replaced by cheaper AI — he didn’t dwell on fairness or bad luck. Instead, he retooled his business to make his work irreplaceable, and ended up more profitable than before. For McBride, that’s the essence of radical responsibility: Stop assigning blame, set clear values, and make choices that align with them. “Happiness doesn’t come from vision boards or birthday wishes,” he writes. “Happiness comes from intentionally creating a life you love. It comes from taking responsibility for your life.”

Where McBride focuses on responsibility as the engine of change, digital communication expert Gabriele Geza Gobbo frames intentional living as reclaiming real-world presence. Raised in northern Italy before smartphones, Gobbo grew up with connection as something physical, not digital. Decades later, he found himself slipping into what he calls “Digital Sleepwalking,” or moving through life on autopilot with a phone in hand. But then when visiting friends in a small mountain town, they had a Sunday dinner where no one brought phones to the table. In those hours of uninterrupted conversation, he felt a muscle relax that had been tense for years. Since then, he’s made a practice of building small, deliberate breaks from technology into his daily life, as a reminder that “a meal is a meal, a walk is a walk, a conversation is a conversation.” His advice is simple: you don’t have to delete every app or take a month offline, but start by letting your phone miss you for a couple of hours. He says the practice makes space for presence to become the default instead of the exception.

— Anna Dorn