A Good Life

Kierkegaard said that the greatest hazard of all is losing oneself — dangerous because it occurs so quietly. To be fully ourselves, then, is a thunderous feat. It is to resist the inertia of comfort and conformity and half-lived lives; to engage in the deliberate, demanding act of self-authorship rather than assuming a role that has already been... 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... See more

About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap : situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.

The mediocrity trap is a nasty way... See more

I’d like to keep my family together and raise my boys into adults who are “publicly useful and privately happy.” Anything else is gravy.