Thought provoking

A good conversation is not a group of people making a series of statements at each other. (In fact, that’s a bad conversation.) A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers her own perspective based on her own memories, and floats it back

Politics seems to offer an arena of moral action. To be moral in this world, you don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow. You just have to be liberal or conservative, you just have to feel properly enraged at the people you find contemptible.

Therefore, morality is mostly about the small, daily acts of building connection—the gaze that says “I respect you,” the question that says “I’m curious about you,” the conversation that says, “We’re in this together.”

People who score high in neuroticism have more emotional ups and downs over the course of the day. They can fall into a particular kind of emotional spiral: They are quick to see threats and negative emotions; they interpret ambiguous events more negatively; they are therefore exposed to more negative experiences; this exposure causes them to

the saying goes, they are not going to solve their problem at the same level of consciousness at which they created it.

I’m no longer content to ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, I ask, “How did you come to believe X?”

The ability to craft an accurate and coherent life story is yet another vital skill we don’t teach people in school. But coming up with a personal story is centrally important to leading a meaningful life. You can’t know who you are unless you know how to tell your story. You can’t have a stable identity unless you take the inchoate events of your

Therapists are essentially story editors. People come to therapy because their stories are not working, often because they get causation wrong.

EGOTISM. The number one reason people don’t see others is that they are too self-centered to try. I can’t see you because I’m all about myself. Let me tell you my opinion. Let me entertain you with this story about myself. Many people are unable to step outside of their own points of view. They are simply not curious about other people.