Eudaimonia & Wellbeing
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
slow down
open.substack.com“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
Maria Popova • Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss
Social media doesn’t let us actually absorb the information we consume. We’re blasted with low-context content and given no time to reflect on what we’ve just consumed before the next video starts to play. Functionally, it’s the same as junk food – we absorb the message straight into our psyche without vetting it, contextualizing it or reflecting... See more
Something strange and wondrous begins to happen when one spends stretches of time in solitude, in the company of trees, far from the bustle of the human world with its echo chamber of judgments and opinions — a kind of rerooting in one’s deepest self-knowledge, a relearning of how to simply be oneself, one’s most authentic self. Wendell Berry knew... See more