Eudaimonia & Wellbeing

The project I'm doing is basically turning myself into a certain type of person who is able to have these thoughts. The essays are kind of just exhaust from the project. The work is growing emotionally and intellectually in such a way, and just going out into the world, talking to people, reading, looking at things, and becoming the kind of mind

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You can’t wait until everyone understands you and gives you their permission and blessing to go live your life how you want. You don’t need to feel guilty about moving on, letting go, losing their dumb status games, and going after your own life goals. It is ok if you’re not properly calibrated to humanity and meet some people who try to take

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The Trouble with Passion also raises more existential questions about the prioritization of passion among career decision-makers.

What does it mean to center paid employment in one's self-reflexive project?

How does it perpetuate a culture of overwork and close off other meaning-making opportunities? And in what ways might the popularity of the

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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

The purpose of moral principles, or more particularly moral virtues , is to guide us towards our telos . Once we lose the crucial concepts of character and potential, we are left with a morality consisting of abstract rules, or an acceptance of “human nature” as it is, or judgements about particular actions removed from their proper context. As... 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