But back to me.

Re-reading my old journals, one thing that stands out is how inaccurate most of my supposed self-knowledge always turns out to be. I’ll think I’ve understood something, then later realize I was wrong, but think this time I really understand, and so on and so on into infinity. We are so good at lying to ourselves that when we search for self-knowled... See more

Going to the gym works even if you don’t know how or why you got so out of shape in the first place. The same is true for working on your mind. When I stopped searching for deep explanations and just started trying to make steady, incremental changes in my life, the whole project got a lot easier.

in some ways I think it actually sits in opposition to acceptance. When you search for an explanation for why a certain attribute of your character came to be, you’re sort of saying that the “true” you doesn’t have that attribute—you’re only like that because some other thing made you that way.

But it remained a primarily elite phenomenon until Freud and the advent of psychoanalysis at the turn of the 20th century. Now there was a whole new area of ourselves to understand: the unconscious, where our hidden dreams and desires lived.

Socrates’ famous quip that “the unexamined life is not worth living” referred not to navel-gazing examinations of one’s personal life, but rather to deep inquiry into the nature of life in general—in other words, to doing philosophy.