Thought provoking

“This Is Good”

In front of large audience of people “considering some kind of life or career in the world of ideas,” as he put it, the economist Tyler Cowen asked Camille Paglia to offer a piece of advice based on her many years of soldiering through adversity, rejection, and failure before eventually emerging in her mid-40s as a successful and

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You wrote that the brain evolved to seek out the “edge of informational chaos” — a place where our predictive models begin to break down, and in those uncertain zones, we actually have much to learn.

October 2024

I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write.

One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people have a mole they're worried about; people who... See more

The philosopher Kierkegaard wrote 150 years ago, and he was one of the first psychological philosophers who really wrote about anxiety. He regarded himself rather useless, all things considered. He wrote a section in one of his books about all the industrialists who were operating in Europe at that time, trying in every possible way to make life... See more

From the Inner Compass deck guidebook by Neel van Lierop, under ‘Open Doors’: “Do not try and open doors with sheer willpower, go for the ones that are already ajar. You do not need to struggle to get what belongs to you. When you recognize situations that enter your life effortlessly, without any force or resistance, you can trust that they guide

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“When I get up in the morning and look in the mirror, I reach the same conclusion every time: that there is only one Morten looking back at me, despite my many different titles. We live only one life, in one time.”

I was struck by what Morten says about us having one ‘indivisible’ life, and the dangers of segmenting our life - and our time - into... See more

feelings are meant to be felt - that’s what they are for. We heal by acknowledging our emotions and test our heart’s resilience by lingering within the unbearable. It is something music can help us do. We find our hearts are much stronger than we presumed, and what we thought was unbearable was nothing of the sort. Music draws forth these... See more