to be

There was a Jesuit preacher, Anthony de Mello, who said if you’re suffering but not willing to do anything about it, you need to suffer more. Suffer until you get sick of your suffering. Which sounds harsh, but it’s true. The transformative moments in my life only came when the pain of staying the same finally became greater than the pain of... See more

The structure of our social media feeds place us in a Never-Ending Now. Like hamsters running on a wheel, we live in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption — a merry-go-round that spins faster and faster but barely goes anywhere. Stuck in the fury of the present, we’re swept up in dizzying chaos like leaves in a gale-force wind. Even... See more

we should heed the words of British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott:

“It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.”

We have all been sabotaged or wounded by others at some point or another: endured a series of unfortunate events, been dumped, needlessly suffered, dealt a bad hand. But, in looking back on it, those were never the things that broke me. The thing that broke me was my own inaction in the face of those circumstances, my desire to lick my wounds, my... See more

It’s not you against the world; it’s you against yourself.

Desire (as opposed to need) is an intellectual appetite for things that you perceive to be good, but that you have no physical, instinctual basis for wanting – and that’s true whether those things are actually good or not.

They say that social situations will reveal who you are because personality is relative and you don’t have anybody to compare yourself to when you’re alone. I like how the poet John O’Donohue put it when he wrote: “In the presence of the other, you begin to see who you are in how they reflect you back to yourself.”

To put it succinctly: when you take an ironic, negative, or numb attitude to everything, you are by definition not on the line for solutions, and when you stop looking for solutions, you lose all agency and will in your life.