A Good Life

An activity worth doing:

Create a list of activities and values (max 12) that make you feel content and part of a healthy humanity. Essentially, what does a good week look like to you? It might be photographing, making food, participating in community events, writing to friends or having kind boundaries. Rate your success for engaging with each and ... See more

An enlightened being sees their agony without diminishing its reality. In other words, it doesn’t just turn away from it—but, on the other hand, simultaneously sees everything, including that agony [and] including hell, actually, as bubbles of bliss in an ocean of bliss. That’s the kind of cognitive dissonance that the ordinary mind cannot get arou... See more

Ask yourself about the kind of life you want: What would you do day to day, and with whom, and where? Consider the life you have. Do one thing today, however small, to close the gap between the two.

For over 99 percent of our species’ history we lived amidst scarcity. Thus you, dear reader, like me and everyone else, evolved to seek out high-reward, low-energy-needed-to-acquire goods. This strategy worked well for hundreds of thousands of years. But now, in modern times of abundance, it is backfiring. Like so many things, what works, works—unt... See more

Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream… But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.

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There is almost no path a human being c... See more

We are taught to aspire to prestige, taught to fetishize the idea of the thing instead of enjoying the thing itself. If you raise kids that way, you end up with a generation that prefers porn to sex. It’s Narcissus mesmerized by his own reflection: you’d rather watch yourself looking good than actually live .

“ There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life sp... See more

Our tendency to try to escape from the universe to find a nirvana that’s sort of quiet and peaceful and apart from all this hullabaloo is undermined completely by the realization of the nature of reality. You realize that the wisdom of the nature of reality leads you into compassion for the beings who are here, and the little bit of bliss that you ... See more