Identity

we uncover a level of fatigue we didn’t know we carried, an existential exhaustion that stems from decades of running, chasing, doing, seeking, and adhering to the structures and the schedules laid out by a world that has gone mad.

We are programmed as children to act and feel a certain way toward certain stimuli. Those programs keep running without interruption until what I call our moment of awakening. Before that, we’re all just asleep letting our programming run our lives

the elevation of emotion over reason and of the senses over the intellect; an introspective orientation and fascination with the self; hypersensibility and heightened awareness of sentiments and moods; a keen interest in strangers and strangeness; the pose of a contrarian; a belief in community combined with a need for solitude; an appreciation for

So many high-achieving people get trapped into obsessing about the external world and neglecting their internal world. When you’ve been suppressing things for so long, you can’t just decide to stop all at once. Learning to listen to yourself takes a long time. I used to think that I always had to justify everything to myself—that I needed to be com

challenge at least two of the counterproductive assumptions Clare’s story revealed: the feeling that she had to force herself—that there needed to be an inner conflict; and that this constant conflict is normal,

Perhaps we’ve spread ourselves too thin, by trying to do too much, too fast, with too little. Or maybe we are just limited by a conventional view of success. When we constantly pursue and prioritise ‘more’ above ‘meaning’, we take wrong turns, box ourselves in,