Welcome to the seventh edition of Airplane Mode, where less is more and the WiFi is always off.

Every week, we curate 3 impactful ideas for you to stop and ponder, taking you away from the algorithm and putting you back in control of your most valuable resource: your attention.

Use this newsletter as a signal to pause, breathe, and think, helping you realign with your purpose and clear out the ‘scroll pollution’ that clouds our brains every day.

Thank you for flying with 99 Lives 🐆✈️

Inflammation in our body is a bit of a paradox.

On one hand, situational inflammation is good for our body in moments where we are fighting infections, healing injuries, or recovering from exercise.

On the other hand, chronic inflammation is an entirely different story. This is when inflammation lingers without any clear reason, persisting even in the absence of injury or threat. It is responsible for a variety of conditions and chronic diseases, like depression, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer.

Until now, science has suggested that chronic inflammation is simply a natural byproduct of aging (sometimes called inflammaging). But the beauty of science is that it changes with new information, and new research from June 2025 tells a different story.

Research in Nature Aging looked into the idea of inflammaging, to see if it was indeed a natural aging byproduct, only to discover that inflammaging was in fact not the human standard worldwide, and potentially only occurs in industrialized countries.

To study this, researchers looked at the chronic inflammation levels of people from two industrialized, high-income nations (Italy and Singapore) and compared it with hundreds of individuals from two indigenous tribes in South America and Asia.

The research in the industrialized countries found that, as people aged, chronic inflammation levels were elevated and continued to rise with age, directly impacting each individual’s ability to recover and stay healthy.

In contrast, the research of the indigenous populations found that they have no age-related increase in chronic inflammation. This fact was true even though these indigenous tribes had increased exposure and reduced defenses to pathogens and infections, without the help of modern medicine.

As a result of this lack of chronic inflammation, the indigenous tribes had very minimal chronic age-related diseases, like heart disease, diabetes, or cancer.

This means that inflammation may not be an inevitable result of aging, but a product of a mismatch between our immune systems and our modern environments. A knock-on effect of the pollutants, toxins, and processed food we take in & the often sedentary life we lead.

A few weeks ago, we looked at a section from The Culture Map by Erin Meyer, about how different cultures convey information on a spectrum of low-context vs. high-context cultures.

This week, we are going to look at another type of communication: disagreement. All cultures handle disagreements differently, some are more direct and confrontational while others are more avoidant and focus on saving face.

Confrontational cultures aren’t simply angry or explosive, they often value disagreement as a constructive tool for growth and clarity. They value honesty and directness as a pathway to better outcomes and bringing the group closer.

As the spectrum shows above, some of the cultures most comfortable with confrontation when disagreeing include Israel, France, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, and Spain.

Avoidant cultures tend to focus more on the repercussions of confrontation, seeing it as rude, disruptive and shame-inducing. Disagreement and debate are perceived as having negative impacts on a team or organization and break up group harmony.

Avoidant cultures include Japan, China, Indonesia, Thailand, and Ghana.

Interestingly, when we look at low-context vs. high-context cultures from our previous newsletter, we can see that a country like Japan is a high-context culture, meaning that people are less direct in general, reading between the lines of what is said is much more important and it seems the same is true with disagreement in Japan as well.

The US finds itself in the middle of this spectrum, and is famous for what is known as the “Oreo Cookie Approach”. In American workplaces, feedback is often delivered this way, delivering the criticism (cream filling) in between two positive statements (cookies).

Breakups suck. Whether you’re the one giving or receiving the news, it is simply never easy. Most of us focus on the why when it comes to a breakup, but researchers out of Romania in 2024 decided to look in a different direction, the how.

They wanted to understand all the different strategies humans use to break up with their partners and compare them with different human personality traits. To do this, they did a two-part study, first asking a bunch of study participants all the different ways they would end an unhappy relationship.

The results of Part 1 found 45 different breakup methods.

In Part 2, they asked a different set of participants to rate how likely they were to use any of these 45 breakup methods (they could pick more than one), while also completing a separate personality assessment.

In the end, the researchers identified 9 main styles of breaking up, and those 9 styles formed 3 core strategies:

When comparing these results with the personality assessments, some minor patterns emerged. People higher in agreeableness (i.e. kind and empathetic) tended to confront the situation directly using Soften the Blow techniques.

However, people with dark triad traits (like psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism) tended to avoid confrontation, using manipulative or distancing strategies, often blaming the partner for the breakup.

We can’t always control how we show up in the hardest moments, but understanding these patterns is a powerful first step to developing awareness and analyzing how they have played out in past relationships.

(See below to look deeper at the 9 styles of breakup methods)

Thanks for reading the seventh edition!

You can count on Airplane Mode arriving in your inbox every week, just in time for you to switch off & reconnect with the topics that matter most.