Becky Lloyd Pack

A WONDERFUL THING happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems — you ceased hoping your ... See more

Skye Cleary, in her book about the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, explains it like this:

To become authentic means to create our own essence. It’s the creation that is vital here. We don’t discover ourselves, we make ourselves.

When we let others define the desirable effects we judge our actions by, we become tools of their agenda rather than agents of our own goals. Further, when we don't even realize we've let some other authority choose our desirable effects, we get caught in a frustrating cycle. Effective action may lead to more frustration rather than alleviating it.

Is running five miles better than running three miles? No. One is only farther than the other. Is reading more books in a year better than reading fewer? No. It's just a meaningless statistic one can track on GoodReads.

So maybe 'better' needs to be a watchword as we navigate the 21st-century economy. 'Better' tips us off to an assumed judgment. It ... See more

I have no patience for those who use our desperate situation as an excuse for inaction. I’ve learned that if you deprive most of these people of that particular excuse they just find another, then another, then another. The use of this excuse to justify inaction — the use of any excuse to justify inaction — reveals nothing more nor less than an inc... See more