Brian Thomas Clark

To put it more plainly: As you grow older, you face the interconnected questions of which parts of yourself to preserve, which parts of yourself to evolve, and which parts of yourself to abandon .

I think these are fun questions to work over, because they’re questions without easy answers and, anyway, there’s no opting out of them. You can ignore... See more

But that eternal present is a lie, an illusion, a fabrication of the digital interfaces. And this not only destroys our sense of the past but also undermines our ability to think about the future.

In an environment without past or future, all we have is stasis.

So it’s no coincidence that culture has stagnated in this eternal digital now . The same... See more

My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. There’s certainly a vulnerability to that, and an incredible freedom... To be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel... See more

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.... See more

Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in... See more

Journaling, especially if you include things you’re grateful for, is the cheapest possible therapy. It’s been shown to provide positive mental health benefits, alleviating anxiety, and tamping down intrusive thoughts while improving short-term memory. Focusing on gratitude has been shown to decrease materialism in young people, among the myriad... See more

We would be far better off seeking out (or tacitly engineering) encounters in which we both have to struggle together to achieve a common goal. This might be something far out-of-the ordinary – rock-climbing, cliff-diving – or it might be something much more quotidian, like hunting down a hard-to-find ingredient for a meal, or even doing laundry.

We... See more

Meaningful friendships develop when things are intense, and involve peril, beauty, jeopardy, drama and self-development

Our oldest and closest friends – those we might call meaningful – have seen us at close quarters. They know our flaws, our faults, our failures; all the things that might make us less than admirable. They don’t like us in spite of these, but because of them. In the end, friendship is an acknowledgement of our imperfect humanity; built not through... See more