Want to feel benefits of a break? Don't give up the day job ...

Back from a short break, which has given me ample time to think about the importance of work. A break, however reinvigorating, is only a break if it is a break from something.

A job isn’t just a livelihood. It’s a rhythm, a purpose, a social necessity, a psychological structure, “the nobility of work”, as the UK chancellor, Rishi Sunak, put it this week. One of the great – and often unmentioned - pre-Covid success stories was that more people globally had jobs than ever before (3.3 billion, though of course they were not all secure and well paid).

One reason to be a little sceptical about universal basic income (money that everyone would get regardless of whether they work or not) is that replacing the income is the (relatively) easy bit – replacing the purpose far harder. In the same way, working from home may have been a novelty for millions over the past four months, but it is unlikely to become the default new normal. People need the nexus, the network, the buzz of the hub.

So it was good this week to see a string of initiatives to preserve, foster, encourage and proliferate work, including:

• Britain’s lifeline for the arts. Two-minute read, no intermission

• Stopping the rot: the app helping farmers to skip the middlemen. Two-minute read

• The drive-in gigs keeping comedians on the road. Ninety-second punchline

• Jobs for the boys – and girls. Two-minute recap

Other than that, Upside pieces this week ranged mostly across things environmental, including:

• The world’s largest rooftop farm – in Paris! Three-minute read

• Could rock dust hold the key to capturing and storing CO2? Ninety-second read

• The return of bison to the UK. Six-thousand-year wait

Lucky numbers

We are indebted to a reader called Harry (surname supplied) who wrote in to inform us that Ecosia, the non-profit web search alternative to Google, is about to plant its 100,000,000th tree. Ecosia uses ad revenue from its traffic to replant the earth.

“They also help support local communities and they don’t sell your data,” Harry enthuses. Time to switch your search engine perhaps …

In a similar vein, Reuters reported this week on a prediction that 2019 will prove to be the year carbon emissions peaked.

What we liked

This is riveting: a new way of counting fish using the DNA they leave behind in surrounding waters, as published by our friends over at Struggles from Below.

Meanwhile, still underwater, Mongabay published a startling piece about the cancer-fighting properties of a tropical sponge.

This is refreshing too: a counter-punch to all those pieces that argued Covid 19 would change everything. Er, no it won’t …

And finally, this from The Conversation was interesting on the latest links between depression and inflammation. For more on the unlikely upsides of clinical depression, you could also check out a podcast I did with the charity Mind this week. Not too many laughs in there, but plenty of advice about recovery, rejuvenation and acceptance …

Where was the Upside?

In the former cricketer Michael Holding’s impassioned cry for education as a panacea to confront racism, bigotry, prejudice and conflict between people of different races.

Also, in an era of noise, a very quiet shoutout for the latest technology that promises to silence the thrum of the outside world.

That’s it for this week. Have a fine weekend. Do ping us whenever and wherever you see the upside.