Wellness

you were just another cog, just the smallest possible pinion in the engine of global progress, one of mass culture’s million tiny underwriters, dispersing risk.” “And how was I doing that, exactly?” “It was your whole starving artist ethos, that whole rebel-without-a-cause motif. Back then, we really believed that the worst person in the entire sou

Whereas most people his age found it pleasant or amusing to reconnect with the long-lost friends now finding each other on Facebook, Jack experienced this same phenomenon as a kind of deep threat. In Chicago, he is not the same person he was in Kansas—he has tattooed his body and changed his whole persona and walled off that part of his personal st

Step 4: Locate the Leader. It had been Elizabeth’s experience that all social groups—no matter how egalitarian they seemed on the surface—had one person who was, at any given moment, on some deep and perhaps even unconscious level, in charge. A kind of social conductor that the group tacitly elevated.

It was the ritual that was important—the acupuncturist’s thorough examination, the couple’s elaborate date, the mother’s comforting home remedy, the ceremonial mixing of the absinthe. It was in these observances that the placebo effect activated and materialized: the transubstantiation of belief into reality, of story into truth, a metaphor made fl

Turns out, if all your companionship and social capital derives from being an important artist, it is frightfully easy to decide that you are one.

the study of placebo was really the study of context and expectation and faith and symbol and metaphor and story, which could lead people to believe any number of delusions.

“Nobody understood their real motivations.” “And isn’t that the truth! Over the years, I’ve found that people tend to act automatically and think automatically, but when they’re pressed to explain why they act or think a certain way, they rush into the void and invent a story. And then, incredibly, they believe that story.” “Even if the story isn’t

His wife and son were becoming other people, new people, people who found Jack more and more unnecessary.

Elizabeth realized she needed to take the entire conversation-entering process that she had intuitively perfected all those times she was the new kid in school and break it down for Toby into manageable, followable micro-steps (honestly this was pretty fun for her; behavioral psychologists tend to love their flowcharts). The first step was Observe,

Jack means it to be a lesson on the difference between reality and the representation of reality. Beauty, he tells his students, is a constructed, not intrinsic, condition. The things we think are beautiful are only the things that have been depicted beautifully. And if it’s not depicted, it’s not seen. It never enters the imagination. It becomes a