feature or a bug?

how advantages can be disadvantages and strengths can be weaknesses

A 2018 study found that people typically pursue higher levels of education because they believe it will lead to more leisure time. But, in fact, more educated people tend to have less leisure time.13 They earn more money, but also work more hours. This upends their expectations and ends up having a net zero effect on overall happiness.

Rob Henderson • Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class

THE GREAT TRIUMPH (OR horrible tragedy, depending on how you look at it) of being human is that our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand our mortality.

Caitlin Doughty • Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time. Give yourself permission to be a beginner.” — Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

We should accept that our brains are strange, delicate instruments that evade our direct commands and are perplexingly talented at warding off the very ideas that might save us or help us flourish.

The School of Life • How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity (Work series)

Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.

-Jack Kornfeld

Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

Richard Feynman

“Contrary to popular belief, time does not heal, time does not fly, time does not do anything. Time has no consciousness. It does nothing for you. The key to happiness now is what you choose to do with your time right now. Are you, right now, making the most valuable use of your time? This moment is, after all, the time of your life. Your choices a... See more

human belief systems are good at absorbing contradictions into their thinking.

Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe

II.

Writer and activist James Baldwin on the power of reading:

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been ali