Why Change Shouldn’t Surprise Us

BS : I used this story to tee up one of the central questions the book asks: What does it mean to have a strong and enduring sense of self when everything is always changing, including you? I am fascinated by this paradox. We all want to be solid and stable, and yet we are also constantly undergoing these shifts to our sense of self. I wanted to st... See more

Here is where culture enters the picture. I mean“culture” in its anthropological rather than artisticsense. What values and practices can hold people to-gether as the institutions in which they live fragment? My generation suffered from a want of imagination inanswering this question, in advancing the virtues ofsmall-scale community. Co

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Control is why brains are on constant alert for the unexpected. Unexpected change is a portal through which danger arrives to swipe at our throats. Paradoxically, however, change is also an opportunity. It’s the crack in the universe through which the future arrives. Change is hope. Change is promise. It’s our winding path to a more successful tomo

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When it comes to dramatic shifts of this nature, I like to reflect on why it happened so I can have a better understanding of the architecture of my cognitive blind spots. In this case, there was something that I was clearly missing from my worldview that was made apparent only after I personally experienced it. Where else do these blind spots exis... See more

Our collective idea of “community” has changed dramatically over the past couple of decades. Tectonic societal and economic shifts, as well as blindingly fast advances in technology, have caused each of us to periodically erase and redraw our own definitions and expectations of the communities around us.