Wellness

Neo-Bohemia by Richard Lloyd (who inspired Benjamin Quince’s theory of urban artists as corporate risk managers);

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

This is what it felt like to not belong: the anxiety, the constant low-level wariness, trying to avoid that shame Jack felt when it was revealed to him that he’d been doing something horribly crude, or thinking something horribly shallow. Like this photograph, which was apparently perpetuating violent American dominance, and here he’d thought it wa

certainty was just a story the mind created to defend itself against the pain of living. Which meant, almost by definition, that certainty was a way to avoid living. You could choose to be certain, or you could choose to be alive. And the only thing she was certain of was this: that between ourselves and the world are a million stories, and if we d

Elizabeth called this phenomenon the “meaning effect,” a term she much preferred to “placebo effect.” Because to say that these effects arose from placebo implied that they arose from nothing—for that’s what placebo traditionally was, an inert substance, literally and intentionally useless—when in fact the placebo effect was elicited by the strong

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,

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

“Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home.”