Jay Matthews

Freud’s thinking was also influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, which emphasized individual organisms’ competitive struggle for survival.

One of the biggest challenges people have when embarking on an unconventional path is disconnecting from extrinsic markers of success and listening to internal motivational cues. On the default path, you can spend an entire career playing other people’s games. At first, people on a pathless path try to fill the lack of extrinsic goals with new ones... See more

One month ago I quit my corporate job... I did it now because I realised that I had been sleepwalking through my life. I did it now because the alternatives were so much worse.

" Don’t let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge. Precisely this presence will help your solitude expand. People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult, as it is true for everything alive."

What I’ve seen, over the last 12 years of doing this work, is people discovering that by telling their story and sharing their narrative, no matter how hard it may be, they are helping other people, and in helping other people, they’re healing themselves. And that seems like a physical law of our universe, almost.

Physicists have long noted that their descriptions of the universe were not only accurate and precise, but also seemed to have an intrinsic, even surprising beauty. Wilczek aims to convince us that even if we cannot do physics, we can be amazed and inspired by this beauty, no differently from how we respond to works of art and music.

Kropotkin pointed out that Darwin’s own comments regarding the survival value of the social instincts are widely ignored. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin described how animal species in which cooperation among individuals replaced competitive struggle were able to secure the best conditions for survival. He implied that, in such cases, the... See more