Features

By Dr Tareq Rasheed
International Consultant 
and Trainer

Stress is a phenomenon familiar to most of us. There is no standardised test to diagnose stress because stress is subjective. But read on for my tips for measuring whether your stress levels are too high.

In some cases, stress motivates and encourages us to complete a task we find difficult so that we can take pride in ourselves and what we achieve. In an ideal world, we would have just enough stress to keep us working to our full potential but not enough to overwhelm us.

Stress symptoms manifest themselves when we perceive or feel that life demands exceed our ability to deal with them. When stress takes its toll, we may experience physical and psychological effects that lead to burnout. Burnout is a state of physical and emotional exhaustion when you experience long-term stress.

Assessing your 

stress levels

Rate the following from 1 to 5; 5 = very high and 1 = very low:

•How much do you feel you’re losing control of your life?

•How many negative thoughts overcome you in your personal and professional life?

•To what extent have you become less empathetic and emotional with people in your life, although they do not deserve this?

•How much do you believe you deserve a better life than you are living?

•To what extent do you feel you do not have the energy to act in difficult situations?

•Do you feel that you do not have time to plan for a healthy life?

•How much do you feel your achievements are lower than your potential?

•How often do you feel that you do not have the energy after returning home from work?

•How much do you feel that you do not have real friends to share your stress with and who can support you?

•How much do you feel that deadlines are always stressing you?

Sum up the total and check your stress level:

•Higher than 85: You are experiencing chronic burnout that may negatively impact your physical and mental health and relationships

•From 75 to 85: You are experiencing burnout which, if not addressed, can result in exhaustion that will make it hard to cope with the demands of both your professional and personal life

•From 50 to 74: You are feeling positive levels of stress which help you achieve and to feel healthy

•Below 50: Low-stress levels are also problematic since they signal an insufficient level of interest to keep you engaged in work or life

Managing burnout

You can plan your life according to four focus areas: Personal, organisational, family, relatives, and society. Proper time management and planning will help you feel in control. Regular exercise and meditation can help your brain recover from burnout.

Finally, since developing emotional intelligence requires a heightened awareness of one’s emotions, it can effectively prevent burnout. If you’re experiencing low-stress levels, try to find healthy ways of raising your stress levels by taking on more challenging tasks or responsibilities.

Life is too short to waste suffering from stress and burnout.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

KUALA LAMPUR — Long relegated to an obscure corner of the collectibles market, VHS tapes have been fetching eye-popping prices at auctions in recent months, thanks to nostalgia and an appetite for new investment opportunities.

At a sale by Heritage Auctions in June, a Back To The Future videocassette went for $75,000, while The Goonies and Jaws copies were sold for $50,000 and $32,500 respectively.

Videotape collectors have been around since the late 1970s, when the format was first introduced, but these days most “VHS tapes are worth next to nothing”, according to John, from Newmarket in Canada, who claims to have sold around 3,000 of them over span of more than 20 years.

“You’ll be lucky to get $5 each”, says this active eBay user, who declined to give his last name.

Until recently, only some movies that hadn’t been released online or on other medium, as well as little known horror movies, could command higher prices, sometimes above $1.

But this new trend is mostly focused on blockbuster titles, particularly from the early 1980s. To be deemed valuable, a tape has to meet some specific criteria, with a premium put on first editions and sealed copies. A limited edition, such as a larger box version of Star Wars, would also draw interest.

The George Lucas sci-fi cult classic is widely considered a must-have and several copies have already been sold for over $10,000.

The Holy Trinity could be movies from the first slate ever released on the US market in 1977, namely MASH, Patton and The Sound Of Music, by a financially troubled 20th Century Fox with Magnetic Video.

Jay Carlson, VHS Consignment director at Heritage Auctions, said these could reach “a six-digit number, maybe seven”.

Nostalgia meets investment opportunity

Many long-time collectors are wondering about the sudden surge, 16 years after the last release of a film in this format (A History Of Violence). The last video recorders were manufactured in 2016.

“I think a lot of it is nostalgia and the compulsion to collect,” says Philip Baker, who runs the www.videocollector.co.uk website. “One of the special things about VHS over the other formats is it was the first accessible way to watch a movie in your own home.”

Host of the Completely Unnecessary Podcast, Pat Contri has a different take and draws a parallel between the current VHS trend and video games. He said both markets are flooded with “people who just decided to get into it. They said to themselves: ‘I have money, let’s invest in it.’”

Over the last decade, several of these cultural staples have become collectible asset classes, from sneakers to skateboards, thanks to a new generation of investors, many of whom grew up with them.

A whole industry is getting together, as shown by the growing number of dedicated Facebook groups, grading services assessing authenticity and condition, and auction houses willing to add VHS to their sales.

Contri is critical of the process, “where instead of letting a relatively new collecting hobby for the masses develop naturally, you sort of try to entice people with ‘FOMO’ fear”, as in fear of missing out on a lucrative investment.

“There’s people who are only open box guys, and they’re very sceptical of sealed guys and what it means to their own collecting,” said Carlson. “But I just think it’s a good thing. It’s just a difference in the way that you’re collecting.”

Carlson sees even more potential in VHS tapes than in video games, which recorded two sales for over a million dollars each last year.

“I know a lot of people who aren’t into video games and don’t play video games, but I don’t know very many people who wouldn’t have a favourite movie.”

FUJISAWA, Japan — Posted far from home for his job at Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, father of two Tsutomu Kojima was “really lonely” until he began working remotely during the pandemic for the first time.

COVID-19 has upended office routines worldwide, but in Japan — where punishing hours and reliance on paper files, ink stamps and fax machines has long been the norm — some say the shake-up was sorely needed.

Pre-pandemic, just 9 per cent of the Japanese workforce had ever teleworked, compared with 32 per cent in the United States and 22 per cent in Germany, according to Tokyo-based consultancy firm Nomura Research Institute.

But a quiet revolution in the country’s rigid business culture is under way, with firms working to digitise operations and offer more flexibility to staff who were once expected to stay late, go drinking with the boss and accept far-flung transfers.

Kojima used to live alone in accommodation provided by Hitachi near Tokyo, an hour and a half by bullet train from his family in Nagoya.

Back then he would return only twice a month, but now the 44-year-old works exclusively from home, and says he is more productive and closer to his teenage daughters.

“I have more time to help them with their studies. My youngest told me she hopes things stay like this,” he told AFP.

“I used to feel really lonely” in Tokyo, Kojima said, but he has since realised that “true balance means not giving up on family”.

Nearly a third of jobs in Japan were done remotely during the first Covid wave in spring 2020, the Japan Productivity Centre says, even though the government never imposed strict stay-at-home orders.

The rate has since fallen to 20 per cent, but that is still far higher than before the pandemic, according to quarterly surveys by the non-profit organisation.

To encourage telework, the government and some companies made efforts to phase out personalised ink stamps used to certify documents, as well as the ubiquitous fax machine.

Often in Japan, “business has to be done in person, on paper”, habits dating back to the 1970s and 80s, when the Japanese economy was booming, said Hiroshi Ono, a professor at Hitotsubashi University specialising in human resources.

“One of the things Covid has done is bring those barriers down: work doesn’t have to be done at the office, men can work at home,” he told AFP.

Companies are realising that new ways of working can be more efficient, he added.

“Before Covid, it was so important for employees to show that they’re working hard, instead of actually producing results.”

Reflecting trends elsewhere, people are also fleeing the big city.

A record number of company headquarters moved out of Tokyo last year, according to Teikoku Databank, while the capital’s population decreased for the first time in 26 years.

Among those who have upped sticks are Kazuki and Shizuka Kimura, who left their cramped Tokyo apartment for a custom-built house near the sea.

The couple now mostly do their jobs in communication and marketing remotely from Fujisawa, southwest of the capital, having struggled to both work from home in Tokyo.

“It was really Covid that made us take this decision,” said Kazuki Kimura, who used to seek out other places to do meetings — at his parents’ home or in cafes, remote-work boxes set up in train stations, and even karaoke booths.

“Sometimes you could hear singing from the booth next door,” which made it difficult to concentrate, recalls the 33-year-old, who is now learning to surf.

Shizuka Kimura, 29, thinks “more and more people are now prioritising their wellbeing, rather than their job”, but questions how quickly things will change on a wider scale.

This is a concern shared by Hiromi Murata, an expert at Recruit Works Institute, who says smaller companies may be slower to adapt to new work styles than big firms like Hitachi, Panasonic or telecoms giant NTT.

Remote work can also pose a problem for training new recruits, because “you learn on the job”, Murata said.

“Before, it was so important to meet in the office... each business must find a new balance, in their own way and time.”

PARIS — A decade ago, Elon Musk proposed a new form of transport that would shoot passengers through vacuum tunnels in levitating pods at almost the speed of sound — he called it “hyperloop”. 

Since then, cities from Abu Dhabi to Zurich have been touted as destinations, research projects have gobbled up millions of dollars and a host of commercial ventures have sprung up — even Richard Branson got involved.

“The transportation network has not had a new mode for over 100 years,” said Rick Geddes, a transport infrastructure expert at Cornell University in the United States, who compared the excitement to the early days of aviation.

But nobody has come close to making the hyperloop work.

The difficulties have ranged from costs and finding suitable locations, to simply persuading people that travelling through a narrow tunnel at speeds faster than a jet plane is a good idea.

Musk’s initial proposal would have been a “barf ride”, transport blogger Alon Levy wrote at the time.

Despite all the problems, though, the hyperloop idea still energises university campuses, corporate board rooms and city halls across the world.

Hidde de Bos, a 22-year-old engineering student, first heard of it four years ago.

His university at Delft in The Netherlands excelled in competitions run by Musk’s SpaceX firm, which invited students to develop pods to fire through vacuum tunnels.

Musk returns

“It made me really excited to see what the possibilities were,” he told AFP.

He is now chief engineer of Delft Hyperloop, a non-profit university spin-off.

De Bos said the SpaceX competitions, which were discontinued in 2019, were too focused on speed and became like “drag races in a tunnel”.

Now, his team is taking part in a student-led competition, European Hyperloop Week, which he hopes will refocus on sustainable energy and developing levitation systems.

And Musk himself recently gave a jolt to the hyperloop fraternity by tweeting that his tunnelling firm The Boring Company would “attempt to build a working Hyperloop” in the coming years.

Musk first mentioned the idea in a 2012 media interview before publishing a white paper about it a year later.

But his direct involvement has been sporadic, and he has always encouraged others to develop the idea.

Los Angeles-based firm Hyperloop TT, among the first and most enthusiastic firms to run with Musk’s idea, welcomed his return.

Rob Miller, the firm’s chief marketing officer, told AFP it was “further validation” for the concept.

‘More cautious’

But he stressed that hyperloop was now much bigger than just one man.

Bearing out his point, new proposals have emerged in recent months from local authorities ranging from Italy to India.

However, proposals are one thing, and revolutionising public transport is quite another.

In its early years, Hyperloop TT signed exploratory deals in India, China and beyond.

In 2019, the firm promised a 10-kilometre track would open in the UAE the following year.

None of these projects has come to fruition.

“We’re a little more cautious now about those types of announcements,” said Miller. 

Virgin Hyperloop, a firm briefly helmed by Richard Branson but majority-owned by DP World, which runs Dubai’s ports, has also had to scale back its promises.

Prestige versus price

It was the first company to fire humans along a hyperloop test track back in 2020. 

Branson had mooted a 45-minute journey between London and Scotland.

But Virgin Hyperloop recently abandoned the idea of carrying passengers altogether, shed half its staff and is now focused on a potential freight line in UAE.

Musk has also promised various hyperloop projects that failed to materialise.

Virgin Hyperloop and The Boring Company did not respond to AFP requests for comment. 

Critic Alon Levy says the hyperloop is caught between unrealistic prestige projects across short distances and longer routes that cost too much.

The Abu Dhabi-Dubai route promised by Hyperloop TT is just 130 kilometres, “not even a distance for high-speed rail”, he said.

But potential routes like New York to Miami or Chicago would need around $50 billion just to get started, Levy reckons.

‘Bring it to life’

“You don’t get that from private investors,” he told AFP.

Levy does see one ray of light — newer designs featuring longer bends seem to have resolved the “barf” problem.

And enthusiasts still radiate positivity.

“We’ll keep doing what we’re doing and we’ll bring it to life,” said Miller.

But he conceded his firm had been “overly optimistic about timelines”.

He now predicts the first city-to-city track within five years but won’t divulge the location.

Geddes is also optimistic about the future, though he also reflected that past promises weighed heavy.

“We used to say five to 10 years,” he said. “That was five years ago. Maybe it’s five to 10 years now.”

LOS ANGELES — HBO’s “Succession” topped this year’s Emmy nominations, earning 25 nods on Tuesday, as “Squid Game” became the first non-English-language drama series shortlisted for glory for television’s equivalent of the Oscars.

“Succession”, which follows a rich, powerful family vying to inherit a media empire, led the drama nominees, while “Ted Lasso” and “The White Lotus” topped the comedy and limited series categories with 20 nominations each.

Two other comedies — HBO’s “Hacks” and Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building” — each racked up 17 nominations for the 74th Emmy Awards, to be handed out at a glitzy ceremony in Los Angeles on September 12.

“With production at a historic high, the Academy has received a record number of Emmy submissions this season,” said Television Academy CEO Frank Scherma, praising “this platinum age of television”.

Television productions have ramped back up, after being shuttered or scaled back in the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. 

“Succession” will compete for best drama with “Squid Game”, a violent South Korean satire in which society’s marginalised compete for cash in fatal versions of children’s games — and Netflix’s most-watched series ever.

“Squid Game” also picked up multiple acting nominations, including best lead actor for Lee Jung-jae, to earn 14 nods in total.

The groundbreaking show is hoping to follow in the footsteps of South Korean film “Parasite,” which rocked Hollywood in 2020 by becoming the first non-English-language film to win best picture at the Oscars.

Others in the running for the best drama Emmy include “Euphoria”, “Ozark”, “Better Call Saul” and “Stranger Things”.

“Succession” stars Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong will compete with Lee for best actor in a drama series, while former Oscar winner Adrien Brody earned a guest actor nomination.

“I am a huge fan of ‘Succession’ and am beyond thrilled to have been included in such an extraordinary show,” said Brody of the series, which already won best drama in 2020 with its second season.

“Euphoria” star and past winner Zendaya, 25, became the youngest acting nominee to be shortlisted twice, for best actress in a drama — a category in which “The Morning Show” actress Jennifer Aniston missed out to co-star Reese Witherspoon.

‘Emmy nominated, baby!’

HBO — and its streaming platform HBO Max — won the network nominations battle, earning a combined 140 compared to Netflix’s 105.

In the comedy categories, past winners Jason Sudeikis (“Ted Lasso”), Bill Hader (“Barry”) and Donald Glover (“Atlanta”) will battle it out for best actor, as will Jean Smart (“Hacks”) and Rachel Brosnahan (“The Marvelous Mrs Maisel”) for best actress.

Selena Gomez missed out on an acting nomination for “Only Murders in the Building” — even though her male co-stars Steve Martin and Martin Short earned nods.

But she still made history as the second ever Latina nominated as a producer in the category.

“Abbott Elementary”, ABC’s school-based mockumentary, earned seven nods including acting, writing and comedy series nominations for creator Quinta Brunson.

“Crying shaking and throwing up has new meaning to me because I real life did all three,” Brunson tweeted.

“Still speechless... Emmy nominated, baby!

A-list flocks to limited series

In the limited series categories, “The White Lotus” — a satirical look at hypocrisy and wealth among the visitors to a luxury Hawaii hotel — scored eight acting nominations for an ensemble cast including Jennifer Coolidge and Murray Bartlett.

Elsewhere, A-listers including Colin Firth (“The Staircase”), Andrew Garfield (“Under the Banner of Heaven”), Oscar Isaac (“Scenes From a Marriage”) and Michael Keaton (“Dopesick”) will vie for best actor in a limited series.

But there were notable big-name omissions on the short list for best actress in a limited series, including Julia Roberts (“Gaslit”) and Jessica Chastain (“Scenes from a Marriage”).

Instead, the category will feature Amanda Seyfried (“The Dropout”), Julia Garner (“Inventing Anna”) and Sarah Paulson (“Impeachment: American Crime Story”) among others. 

NEW YORK — Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” pretty much flopped when it came out nearly 40 years ago.

Today, it enjoys cult status and has been performed by everyone from Bob Dylan to Jeff Buckley and Bon Jovi — even appearing in animated hit “Shrek” — in a unique evolution detailed in a new documentary film.

The tune rich in religious and erotic references by the Canadian poet, who died in 2016, has made the rounds.

In 2008, a gospel version of the song was performed by Alexandra Burke on the British TV talent show “The X Factor”. 

That year the song placed 1st, 2nd and 36th in the British music charts: The versions by Burke, Buckley and the original by Cohen himself. 

“I do not know of any other song with that trajectory,” said music journalist Alan Light, who wrote a book on the song called “The Holy or the Broken”, published in 2012.

‘Snowball is rolling’

“This song took 10 years, 20 years, going through all these different versions, around these different corners and then it gains this momentum. The snowball is rolling, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger,” Light told AFP.

He spoke in New York at a showing of the new documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song”, for which was an adviser and producer.

The film shows that, at first, the work was destined for obscurity.

A practicing Jew who eventually retired to a Buddhist monastery, poet-turned-singer Cohen took years to write the spiritual and image-rich lines of the song, which evokes King David, his music and his temptations. 

Cohen left out dozens of the verses he had written.

The Columbia record label refused to release “Various Positions”, the LP that included “Hallelujah,” in the United States. It did come out in Europe, among other the places.

Competition was stiff that year, and slow, poetic songs were not crowding the top of the charts.

“It’s 1984. It’s boom time in the music business. This is the year of ‘Born in the USA’, and ‘Like a Virgin’ and ‘Purple Rain,’” Light said, referring to huge hits by Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and Prince.

A few years later, Dylan lifted the song out of the darkness with a blues version.

Then John Cale, one of the founders of The Velvet Underground, covered it in 1991, followed by Buckley’s in 1994.

Bono apologises

The documentary shows how “Hallelujah” became a feature of popular culture, with new generations discovering it in the first “Shrek” movie in 2001 and in “Sing” in 2016.

In 2010, the Canadian singer K.D. Lang belted it out at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. And 11 years later “Hallelujah” was performed again at a tribute to victims of the coronavirus pandemic, with President Joe Biden in attendance on the eve of his swearing in.

Light says the song has a beautiful melody and but also lyrics open to interpretation. 

“If to you it’s a religious song, that’s there. If to you, it’s a heartbreak song, great, that’s there. You can do that,” Light said.

“There’s no wrong way to do it,” he added, noting a ukelele version by US musician Jake Shimabukuro.

Not all agree, however. 

In an interview for his book on “Hallelujah”, Light recalled how U2 frontman Bono apologised for a 1995 trip-hop version of the song he recorded, in which he talked his way through the lyrics, rather than sang.

TOKYO — From laser beams and wooden satellites to galactic tow-truck services, start-ups in Japan are trying to imagine ways to deal with a growing environmental problem: Space debris. 

Junk like used satellites, parts of rockets and wreckage from collisions has been piling up since the space age began, with the problem accelerating in recent decades.

“We’re entering an era when many satellites will be launched one after another. Space will become more and more crowded,” said Miki Ito, general manager at Astroscale, a company dedicated to “space sustainability”.

“There are simulations suggesting space won’t be usable if we go on like this,” she told AFP. “So we must improve the celestial environment before it’s too late.”

The European Space Agency (ESA) estimates that around one million pieces of debris larger than a centimeter—big enough to “disable a spacecraft”—are in Earth’s orbit.

They are already causing problems, from a near-miss in January involving a Chinese satellite, to a five-millimetre hole knocked into a robotic arm on the International Space Station last year.

“It’s hard to predict exactly how fast the amount of space debris will increase,” said Toru Yamamoto, a senior researcher at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

But “it’s an issue that raises real concerns about the sustainable use of space”.

With satellites now crucial for GPS, broadband and banking data, collisions pose significant risks on Earth.

Tadanori Fukushima has seen the scale of the problem in his job as an engineer with Tokyo-based satellite operator and broadcaster SKY Perfect JSAT.

“A stationary satellite would get roughly 100 ‘debris-approaching’ alerts a year,” he told AFP.

International “satellite disposal guidelines” include rules like moving used satellites to “graveyard orbit”— but the increase in debris means more is needed, specialists say.

‘No panacea’

Fukushima launched an in-house start-up in 2018 and envisions using a laser beam to vaporise the surface of space debris, creating a pulse of energy that pushes the object into a new orbit.

The irradiating laser means there’s no need to touch any debris, which is generally said to move about 7.5 kilometres per second — much faster than a bullet.

For now, the project is experimental, but Fukushima hopes to test the idea in space by spring 2025, working with several research institutions.

Japanese firms, along with some in Europe and the United States, are leading the way on developing solutions, according to Fukushima.

Some projects are further along, including Astroscale’s space “tow-truck”, which uses a magnet to collect out-of-service satellites.

“If a car breaks down, you call a tow-truck service. If a satellite breaks down and stays there, it faces the risk of collision with debris and needs to be collected quickly,” Ito explained.

The firm carried out a successful trial last year and imagines one day equipping customer satellites with a “docking plate” equivalent to a tow-truck’s hook, allowing collection later on.

Astroscale, which has a contract with the ESA, plans a second test by the end of 2024 and hopes to launch its service soon after.

Other efforts approach the problem at the source, by creating satellites that don’t produce debris.

Kyoto University and Sumitomo Forestry envisage a wooden satellite that goes into orbit in a rocket and burns up safely when it plunges to Earth.

That project is also in its infancy — in March, pieces of wood were sent to the International Space Station to test how they respond to cosmic rays.

Space agencies have their own programs, with JAXA focusing on large debris over three tons.

And internationally, firms including US-based Orbit Fab and Australia’s Neumann Space have proposed ideas such as in-orbit refueling to extend the life of satellites.

The problem is complex enough that a range of solutions will be needed, said JAXA’s Yamamoto.

“There is no panacea.”