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Postal carrier had a 'gut feeling' after seeing mail pile up for three days. It saved a life.

This dedicated public servant became a small town hero.

YouTube

Kayla Berridge went above and beyond.

Kayla Berridge had been walking her normal 9-mile delivery route in Newmarket, a small town in New Hampshire, when she noticed something unusual.

The mail she had been delivering continued to pile up over a matter of days at one resident’s home. The resident was an elderly woman in her 80s, and would occasionally share a chat with Berridge, according to CNN.

Berridge told CNN that after noticing the unattended mail pile, she got “a little concerned.”

“I just had this gut feeling and wanted to make sure,” Berridge told WMUR 9 News, explaining that “most people put a hold in if they’re not there, so when people pick up their mail every day, you start to notice their habits.” Not to mention, the woman’s car was still in the driveway.

Berridge followed her instincts and called the local police department for a wellness check, and in the process saved the elderly woman’s life.

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wholesome

Pop Culture

Over 300,000 people from 192 countries filmed their life on July 25, 2020. The highlight reel is incredible.

"Life in a Day" is like a home movie of humanity that illustrates our diversity, yet also shows how very much alike we are.

Life in a Day/YouTube

The "Life in a Day'" documentary gives us a glimpse of daily life around the world in the early months of the pandemic.

Despite our tumultuous history of conflict over our differences, there is far more that unites humanity than divides us. We are wholly unique individuals who share various group identities, but at the end of the day, we are all simply human.

Nothing makes that fact clearer than peeking into the daily lives of people all over the world—seeing how we all connect with our families and friends, how we enjoy the outdoors, how we take care of ourselves and others, how we create our livelihoods and more. But few people are able to travel extensively enough to see those things firsthand.

That's where the YouTube Original "Life in a Day" comes in.

The original "Life in a Day" video project was crowdsourced from ordinary people around the world who filmed their lives on July 24, 2010. From the 80,000 clips sent in, a filmmaking team under the direction of Kevin Macdonald, Tegan Bukowski, and Loressa Clisby pieced together an award-winning documentary.

Then, when the coronavirus pandemic hit in early 2020, MacDonald decided to revisit the idea to capture the experience we were sharing as a global community. Only this time, more than 300,000 people from 192 countries sent in their day-in-the-life films from July 25, 2020 to contribute to the project.

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humanity

Education

A college student who was fed up with his classmate has gone viral for calling out his own ignorance

You know that feeling you get when you walk into a classroom and see someone else's stuff on your desk?

OK, sure, there are no assigned seats, but you've been sitting at the same desk since the first day and everyone knows it.

So why does the guy who sits next to you put his phone, his book, his charger, his lunch, and his laptop in the space that's rightfully yours? It's annoying.

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His mom cried when she read it, too.

Photo by Santi Vedrí on Unsplash

Standardized testing was not the best day at school for most of us.

When you're a kid, kind words from a caring adult can make such a lasting impression.

Schools can have so much at stake with their testing results, they often inadvertently transfer that pressure onto the students.

That's exactly what happened to Indiana third-grader Rylan as he was gearing up for something most kids dread: standardized testing week.

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Health

Studies show that there's science behind why certain things satisfy you

How excited would you be if you discovered that your guilty pleasures don't always need to make you feel guilty?

Image via Pixabay.

Science seeks to discover the rules of happiness.

True

This article originally appeared on 05.16.16

How excited would you be if you discovered that your guilty pleasures don't always need to make you feel guilty?

Like what if the blissful satisfaction you get from that slice of warm apple pie isn’t necessarily evidence of an intervention-level addiction to sugar and carbs (despite what that magazine cover told you) but could also just be a sign that you’re craving connection and feeling nostalgic?

Or that embarrassingly joyful feeling you have when small, random objects fit perfectly into another may not be a sign that you have obsessive compulsive disorder but just that you, like most people, really appreciate small moments of order in a chaotic world?

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Health

Here are the 17 types of people who deserve a lot more sympathy than they ever get

People in “unskilled” positions deserve a lot more credit.

via Tom Edgington/Flickr and Pexels

Shy and depressed people deserve our sympathy.

The world would be a lot better if we all could put our prejudices aside and see people for who they are as individuals. If we learned how to lean in with our hearts a bit more instead of our judgmental minds, we’d probably treat each other with much more sympathy.

Sadly, we still have a long way to go as a society until we reach that point.

One of the most significant ways that we misjudge others is by attributing their status, appearance and social skills to their moral compass. People who are economically disadvantaged, overweight, or socially awkward are often cast in a negative light because many think that everyone who falls short of a societal “ideal” have done so out of laziness.

However, that type of thinking is lazy in and of itself.

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empathy for all

humanity

This dedicated public servant became a small town hero.

"Life in a Day" is like a home movie of humanity that illustrates our diversity, yet also shows how very much alike we are.

His mom cried when she read it, too.

When you're a kid, kind words from a caring adult can make such a lasting impression.

The need for kids to hear this stuff is real. School pressures are waaaayyy different from when most of us were kids.

Here's Rylan and his mom talking about what it meant to get his teacher's letter.

How excited would you be if you discovered that your guilty pleasures don't always need to make you feel guilty?

How excited would you be if you discovered that your guilty pleasures don't always need to make you feel guilty?

In other words, what if we could trace our feelings of happiness and satisfaction back to our brains and our humanity — and just a little farther away from the guilt-riddled land of right and wrong?

1. It's possible that our brain wiring has a lot to do with how happy we feel.

2. Some things that we're told "shouldn't" affect our happiness actually do — but not as much as we think.

3. Overall life satisfaction leads to longer life. (Duh.)

The region between the men, past the barbed wire, was known as "no man's land," and it's where some of them met as humans rather than as enemies.

Trench warfare in World War I was brutal.

Eventually, some agreed to leave each other alone to get out of the trenches and exercise in the morning rather than shoot at each other.

Soon, many of the German soldiers put up tiny Christmas trees on the edges of their trenches — gifts from home — and lit them with candles.

In fact, as they got to know each other better, you can imagine them wondering who was in their sights when they pulled the trigger.

Eventually, the high command on both sides, hearing of the troops that had met on Christmas Eve of 1914, issued orders for such things to cease.

People in “unskilled” positions deserve a lot more credit.

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