juliana ong

People who value choices over happiness never argue about it. They are proud of it. People who value happiness over having a life full of interesting opportunities get indignant over being accused that they made that choice.

Most of us have never experienced the kind of love that transforms you and expands your interiority, so we don’t realise it’s out there. But it is and it exists. Once you’ve experienced it, you can’t go back to the mimicry, because it feels like a sorry excuse for the real thing.

In Pascal’s Pensées, he writes “And how shall [man] be happy? By finding something to occupy him, that shall divert him, and prevent him from seeing himself what he is. For if he saw himself as he is, he would be miserable indeed.”

And so the trick is, can you force yourself to be absolutely unsparingly realistic about what’s actually best for you?

A team of psychologists found that the link between authenticity in relationships and relationship satisfaction is very strong. For instance, people who strongly agreed with statements such as “I share my deepest thoughts with my partner even if there’s a chance he/she won’t understand them” reported being particularly happy in their relationships.

I grew up believing what all modern people are taught: that freedom meant lack of constraint. Orthodoxy taught me that this freedom was no freedom at all, but enslavement to the passions: a neat description of the first thirty years of my life. True freedom, it turns out, is to give up your will and follow God’s. To deny yourself. To let it come. I... See more

"The economy is just smart people paying beautiful people to promote stuff to insecure people." — @ShaanVP

In a world of fast content incentivized by advertising-based attention-hacking business models, being slow and considered is a superpower.