Caroline Mays

Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don't get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.

"Let us ask the gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them. In Utopia, said Thoreau, each would build his own home; and then song would come back to the heart of man, as it comes to the bird when it builds its nest. If we cannot build our homes, we can at least walk and throw and run;... See more

Bernadette Jiwa has written half a dozen extraordinary books that humanize the too-often industrialized craft of marketing.

In Story Driven, she makes it clear that if we merely try to fill a hole in the market, we’re doomed to a cycle of rearview-mirror behavior. We’re nothing but a commodity in the making, always wary of our competition. We have... See more

The better life you absolutely can build isn’t going to be brought to you by ChatGPT but by your own steady uphill clawing and through careful management of your own expectations. You live here. This is it.

In a single sentence, author Virginia Woolf encourages us to live with a strong foundation — to know our values and be grounded in a strong sense of self — but to remain adaptable and open to life:

"I am rooted, but I flow."

Being human is not hard because you're doing it wrong, it's hard because you're doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy

What risk are we radically underestimating as a species? What are we overestimating?

I think we’ve still underestimated the harms of scrolling. I am careful to say “scrolling” because I don’t think social media is itself a bad thing, nor do I think screens are uniformly bad. I think it’s specifically the act of scrolling, which forces us to ingest,... See more