wisdom 📜

The opposite of agency is learned helplessness. If people believe that we can’t do very much to stop the world’s problems, it’s unsurprising that they’d be terrified to bring children into the world. But this seems like a mental trap that we can, and should, teach people to resist falling into. As  Clare Coffey writes  in “Failure to Cop

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Søren Kierkegaard: “To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”

The qualities that make someone a dependable source of excitement are generally the opposite of those that make him or her a dependable source of stability. Seeking both in one real human isn’t much less absurd than dreaming of a partner who’s both six and five feet tall. 

It's the same with most successful people. They're never more engaged than when you disagree with them. Whereas the obstinate don't want to hear you. When you point out problems, their eyes glaze over, and their replies sound like ideologues talking about matters of doctrine.

Pop culture soothes and placates with a steady series of uncomplicated morality tales in predigested narratives where nothing ever really changes and so there’s no worry that the storyline will move in a way that hurts your feelings. Crowdsourced “content” is built on ephemerality.

For all its chilled-out associations, the attempt to be here now is therefore still another instrumentalist attempt to use the present moment purely as a means to an end, in an effort to feel in control of your unfolding time. As usual, it doesn’t work. The self-consciousness you experience when you seek too effortfully to be “more in the moment” i... See more

Myself and people my age have been trained under the illusion that we can effectively eliminate any and all friction from our lives. We can work from home, Amazon prime everything we need, swipe through a limitless array of mediocre dates, text our therapist, and have a person go to the grocery store for us when we don’t feel like it, all while con... See more

Defining yourself by your suffering is an effective way to keep suffering forever

So much of social media is, by design, condensed information — it’s made to be bite-size. So the internet feels faster paced. It’s been really soothing to go to a space where I’m still meeting my desire to connect with people and talk with people, but in a digital realm that’s slower, and that is allowing for a bit more vulnerability, a bit more co... See more

We fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off—because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards. Someth... See more