A Good Life

As J. Jennifer Matthews puts it, in her book Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, “we cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket situated outside of life” to which you could take “life’s provisions and squirrel them away.” Spending your days trying to get... See more

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have . . .... See more

We do not live by our memory; we make use of it to live. Record only what can help you to conceive or to execute, which can be assimilated into your soul, correspond to your objectives, vivify your inspiration, and bolster your work. As for the rest, consign it to oblivion.

A.D. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

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,... See more

The task of living is figuring out a way to build enough resilience to honor, respect and nurture your nature (to essentially cultivate values) so as not to abandon it when the culture endorses something different.