This doesn’t sound that hard, but it is. It takes some serious reflection to sift through the webs of other people’s thoughts and opinions and figure out who the real you actually is.

If genes could talk to their animal, they’d probably issue a few simple commands:Stay alive and well functioning as long as possible. And then pass us into new containers before you inevitably deteriorate. Once we’re in new containers, those containers are more important than you. Sacrifice yourself if it’ll help them fulfill the first two instruct... See more

With so many factors involved, human motivation often comes down to personal priorities and what matters most to people—i.e. their values. Humans have a complicated relationship with morality too, and their conception of what’s right and wrong has a hand in the equation as well.

These two superpowers produced a third superpower—one that, above all, makes humans human: empathy.

But instead they tell her about Santa Claus. They tell Lulu that A) Santa Claus is omniscient—he knows when she’s been sleeping and he knows when she’s awake and he knows when she’s been bad or good; and B) when Santa breaks into their house next Christmas, he’ll leave presents for her if and only if she’s been good.

I think the same applies to marriage.

We crave the Puppet Master’s approval more than anyone’s, and we’re so horrified at the thought of upsetting the Puppet Master or feeling their nonacceptance or ridicule that we’ll do anything to avoid it. When we get to this toxic state in our relationship with a Puppet Master, that person’s presence hangs over our entire decision-making process a... See more

Where you are on this spectrum at any given point is determined by the status of the internal struggle between the two minds.

Pretty soon after cells started joining together to form animals, some of the animals discovered that they could go up another level of emergence and form even bigger giants made up of multiple animals. If you look around, you’ll see them everywhere—schools of fish, packs of wolves, colonies of ants, waddles of penguins. Groups like these represent... See more