Eudaimonia & Wellbeing

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

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

growth feels uncomfortable because you've outgrown the old ways of being within yourself, and the new ways of being still aren't familiar so they feel unsafe. at the same time, there are parts of your old self that you miss, but also fear of a new chapter because you've never done it before.

i know that once this period of distress is over, good

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we are allowed to know peace, to feel ease, to experience softness and deem it sacred. we are allowed to be well without needing to earn it through agony.

“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

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