friends with benefits Archives

Meaningful Last Minute Gifts You Don’t Have to Shop For

If you’re as behind the curve as we are in getting our heads around the holidays, here are two much-appreciated gifts you don’t have to shop for:

A Powerful Question that Cuts Through the Noise

We invite you to ask this question when editing your life down to what is really important, including where you spend your time —and money— online.

Unique, Cheap, Full-of-Wonder Last Minute Gift: Improvised Life

If you’re looking for an instant, inexpensive, totally unique last-minute gift that is full of wonders, give your brilliant someone a subscription to Improvised Life: a month —$1.99— or a year —$18— of view-shifting tools and ideas…

How to Fight a Mall-Like Internet!

When long-time blogger Tina Bray described the looming probability of a mall-like internet, it hit home HARD. There’s a simple, inexpensive way to stem the tide….

We’re Not Advertising Anything, Damn It!

We found this cartoon while we were leafing through The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker, perfect, relaxing bedtime reading. Drawn in 1966 by Charles E. Martin, it’s even more timely today.

Matthew Sporzynski’s Expansive Money and Mindset

Paper artist Matthew Sporzynski has expanded our view for years with his mightily innovative thinking. His stretch money resonates particuarly strongly now.

Last-Minute, Inexpensive, Artisan-Made Gift (They Won’t Throw Out)

actress Hari Neff said hers was a pineapple a schoolmate gave her many years ago. There’s nothing worse than a bad gift you don’t know what to do with that and you just throw out. You can’t throw out a pineapple. We heartily recommend this inexpensive gift for friends and family (or even yourself), that is way better than Neff’s luscious pineapple…

A VERY Strange Anti-Advertising Experiment

Websites that don’t take ads or promote branded content are a rare breed. We’re one. We have an unusual philosophy of “stuff” and how we survive. It’s definitely an experiment in a certain kind of possibility thinking.

Work with Hands, not Brands

In conversation, I never call Improvised Life a blog. The Blogging world is an ubiquitous, saturated and aspirational one; most bloggers put their true opinions aside to survive. We are trying to do something different.

Improvised Life’s Illusory Wealth

Recently, a reader left us a query in Tinypass, our membership platform, and included this comment: “I paid for a subscription to support the writer and I think she has enough support at this point so she doesn’t really need mine.” Yikes!

Join Our Tribe!

Improvised Life is a space that celebrates creative living to the fullest degree. We work hard to collect great ideas from artists; inspiring thoughts from poets; stylish, useful home upgrades; and yummy recipes…and present them with thoughtful commentary and unexpected leaps and associations. A tribe is a community with a similar mindset for living, and we want you in…

What if We Stopped?

Yesterday, we stumbled on Seth Godin’s question “What if you stopped?“, and…. …we did stop for a minute to think about it. What if we stopped publishing Improvised Life?

HOW You See Is What You Get

At But Does it Float, we were struck by this the title of a photography exhibition (not by the photographs). “How you see is what you get” is one of Improvised Life’s essential principles. NOT in the magical thinking way, that we will get everything we want if we just think a certain way. But in…

William S. Burroughs on Finding Answers and Making Changes

Sometimes we work SO hard that our health suffers with ailments like back pain or fatigue…Then we employ these tactics, and take a cue from William S. Burroughs…

Money is a ‘Material for Making’

Among Improvised Life’s many categories and themes is “Materials for Making“. We love finding surprising uses for materials and showing you how you can use them. The other day as we were mulling our Friends with Benefits subscription program, we realized that money is a Material for Making as well.

Friends with Benefits: How to Increase Your Support

After our recent plea ‘er “invitation” to support Improvised Life by subscribing to Friends with Benefits, several subscribers wrote to ask: How would I increase the amount of my Friends With Benefits contribution? Is there a place on the site I can log in to change the amount? Hmmm. We hadn’t thought of that and consulted with…

Calling on Lakshmi, Goddess of Wealth and YOU

We would happily give every Improvised Life article away for free —all 3000 of them— as we did for nearly five years with great pleasure… …if we could.

Improvised Family

Since posting the sudden announcement a week ago that I would be taking a break due to a confluence of big life events, I’ve received the most generous response from Improvised Life’s readers: notes of sympathy, gratitude, understanding, support, all affirming that family is to be found in places we don’t often imagine.

Friends With Benefits: Trading Jewels & Taking Leaps—Together

One of our readers, Carol E., wrote to us, In the morning it’s The Improvised Life with my coffee and then the morning paper. I have described you as a little jewel of a magazine that I read online every morning. Many thanks!’ We love the image of Improvised Life as a “jewel”—it rings true because for the…

An Easy Fix for a Common Subscription Glitch

Since we launched our Friends with Benefits subscription service, we’ve thankfully had few glitches. Occasionally, however, a subscriber writes to say that they get the KnockKnock curtain telling them they’ve used up their five free reads for the month and can’t access more unless they subscribe. But they ARE subscribed. What to do?

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