(other's) Words

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unkno... See more

Man has achieved his present position by being the most aggressive and enterprising creature on earth. And now he has created a comfortable civilization, he faces an unexpected problem... The comfortable life lowers man's resistance, so that he sinks into an unheroic sloth... The comfortable life causes spiritual decay.

"I began to notice this animal dimension in my own speaking—conscious now not only of the denotative meaning of my terms, but also of the gruff or giddy melody that steadily sounds through my phrases, and the dance enacted by my body as I speak—the open astonishment or the slumped surrender, the wary stealth or the lanky ease. Trying to articulate ... See more

I met some of my heroes and some of them sucked; I attended events that were hollow and demented but looked fun online; I eventually realized the best parts of my life weren’t exclusive whatsoever but run-of-the-mill: a result not of being elevated above my peers (on a stage, say) but thrust among them (in the crowd). In time I came to see these po... See more

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946):

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by ... See more

Anxiety, as Rollo May also pointed out, “is not being able to know the world you’re in, not being able to orient yourself in your own existence.”

Absorbed in comfort, we are restless. Drowning in excess, we are hollow. The statistics confirm what our souls already know: despair has metastasized, anxiety has become our natural state, and in the absence of real suffering, we have made a spectacle of our own discontent.