community

Loyalists vs Mercenaries — “There are highly loyal teams that can withstand almost anything and remain steadfastly behind their leader. And there are teams that are entirely mercenary and will walk out without thinking twice about it.”

If the vertical axis is caring personally and the horizontal axis is challenging directly , you want your feedback to fall in the upper right-hand quadrant. That’s where radical candor lies.

What makes friendship so fragile is also exactly what makes it so special. You have to continually opt in. That you choose it is what gives it its value.

But as American life reconfigures itself, we may find ourselves rethinking whether our spouses and children are the only ones who deserve our binding commitments.

What happens when we secularize the belief in oneness?

As many lonely people discover far too late, the reliance of children on their parents and, subsequently, of parents on their children, and the reliance of members of communities on each other, are what fill our lives with meaning, our social bonds with substance and warmth, and our futures with hope.

It is an insolent cliché, almost, to note that our culture lacks the proper script for ending friendships. We have no rituals to observe

Lorde), all deep friendships generate something outside of themselves, some special and totally other third thing. Whether that thing can be sustained over time becomes the question.

The more hours you’ve put into this chaotic business of living, the more you crave a quieter, more nurturing third thing

6-item "Belief in Oneness Scale" consisting of the following items:

1. Beyond surface appearances, everything is fundamentally one.


2. Although many seemingly separate things exist, they all are part of the same whole.


3. At the most basic level of reality, everything is one.


4. The separation among individual things is an illusion; in reality everything

What both of these traits have in common is that I seem to live my life as if I’m under siege. I’m guessing my amygdala is the size of a cantaloupe.

Most of my withered friendships can be chalked up to this terrible tendency of mine not to reach out.