What is the ultimate life hack? | Entertainment/Life

A “life hack” is any process or technique that reduces chaos in one’s life and makes things easier to manage or more convenient. An internet search of life hacks brings up a dizzying number of videos demonstrating a few helpful things and others that I never knew I needed to know.

For example, there’s a video on how to use a curling iron to get wrinkles out of a piece of paper — or another on how to use a single piece of penne pasta to get the last of the lipstick out of a tube and then use said pasta to apply lipstick. 

That said, there are some helpful hacks, full of common sense, like:

• Tie a brightly colored piece of cloth on your luggage to help you spot it at the airport.
• For the short term, tape a dryer sheet over an air conditioner vent to help a room smell fresher.
• Iron a button-up shirt inside out to make ironing easier.
• Put pancake batter in a squeezable old ketchup bottle to make more creative pancakes.
• Use a straw to remove the center and stem of a strawberry. 

You get the point.

Each of those items and plenty more are, indeed, helpful and can improve a circumstance. Certainly, plenty of folks spend incredible amounts of time making videos demonstrating these or similar life hacks.

However, in the difficult times we are experiencing, I’ve started to wonder about other life hacks that might make use of the internet — ones that might make a bigger difference in the world than me spotting my luggage a second faster.

Therefore, I propose folks work toward creating a different strand of life hacks — ones focused on chesed.

What is chesed, you ask? It’s a Hebrew word so rich and loaded with meaning that there is no direct English translation. It means more than benevolence — it’s about living in kindness toward others, practicing compassion and generosity toward those we know well and those we don’t know at all. 

Think about that for a moment. 

What if there were life hacks for:

• How to treat those who work in a service industry with dignity, compassion and kindness?
• How meaningful…