Eudaimonia & Wellbeing
“At the same time, art cannot be understood in terms of purpose. As the sculptor Charles Ray has said, art is “for absolutely nothing.” To make, or experience, art is to enter a kind of free zone; it slows us down, places us in some epistemological estuary, takes us into the wild. We make art from our flaws, fragilities, perversities, from our need
... See morei am renouncing useless guilt, and refraining from making a cult of suffering. i am living in the now (or at least the soon), doing what i fear, trusting joy, and believing i will figure it out. i am taking the time to learn about what brings me joy, not just relief, what feels nourishing, not just numbing.
Yes, philosophy is a serious, rigorous academic discipline, with a lot of people reading Wittgenstein in the original German and pontificating away in a paywalled journal article. But it’s also, I think, a discipline that is meant to resonate with our ordinary lives, our real lives outside the ivory tower. In our real lives, we’re falling in love... See more
how to change your life, part 2: agnes callard's aspiration
distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the commodified counterfeits of happiness that light up these sunset days of Western civilization, with its mesmerism of maximums and its cult of more, materially and spiritually — capitalism goads us to do more in order to own more while the... See more
Maria Popova • The Marginalian
emily dickinson
love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even... See more
Instead of a commitment to "winning" other people's games, I felt a commitment to design a life that I deeply enjoy inhabiting 3. I saw how my ambition can be unleashed not just in work but as a husband, father, friend, gardener, writer, citizen, and whatever other components now make up my fluid and evolving identity. It's not that I didn't... See more
“Love, but be careful what you love,” the Roman African philosopher Saint Augustine wrote in the final years of the fourth century. We are, in some deep sense, what we love — we become it as much as it becomes us, beckoned from our myriad conscious and unconscious longings, despairs, and patterned desires. And yet there is something profoundly... See more