Eudaimonia & Wellbeing

i 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.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has assessed the connection between people’s habits and their subsequent well-being since the late 1930s.

The happiest, healthiest people in old age didn’t smoke (or quit early in life), exercised, drank moderately or not at all, and stayed mentally active , among other patterns. But these habits pale in

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“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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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

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

It takes a particular kind of courage to pour energy and attention into something that you can't yet fully explain or justify to others. Committed seriousness requires a stubborn blindness to conventional metrics of success or importance. You have to be willing to treat something as significant purely because you've decided it is.

More beauty and craft,

less factory line

More weird and rebellious,

less safe and derivative

More really hard inspired work,

less status games

More authentic expression of self,

less patagonia vest