Reclaim The Brain

The scientific virtues are:

• Stupidity


• Arrogance


• Laziness


• Carefreeness


• Beauty


• Rebellion


• Humor

If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists.

Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when... See more

One of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we’d often be better off. Learning to do that is a big part of what mindfulness meditation is about.

“We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them,” she insisted, “but by waiting for them.”3

Freud defined depression as anger turned inwards. There’s some truth to this for sure, but I think the great existential psychologist Rollo May defined it more accurately: “Depression is the inability to construct a future.”

Mary Oliver said, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

PTSD is literally defined as being “marked by an inability to construct a coherent story of our past.”