With everything — but money in particular — our culture trains us to believe we never have what we need, and there’s not enough to go around. Our culture’s focus on individuality and individual responsibility makes it hard to be generous and easy to ignore someone else’s need.
A recent study found that after casual sex, women, on average, report high levels of loneliness, unhappiness, rejection, and regret. Conversely, men report higher satisfaction, happiness, contentment, and mood improvement.
This is one of a few dynamics where social progress supposedly intended to benefit women instead ended up benefiting men.
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.
The task of living is figuring out a way to build enough resilience to honor, respect and nurture your nature (to essentially cultivate values) so as not to abandon it when the culture endorses something different.
Since Freud, psychologists have distinguished between theories of autoplastic and alloplastic change. With autoplastic change, the problem is the patient, and the patient must first improve himself. With alloplastic adaptation, the problem is the environment, and the subject should change his surroundings.
Humans are fundamentally conflicted. One of the foundational conflicts in psychology is between self-enhancement, or the desire to feel good about who we are, and self-accuracy, or having an honest, realistic understanding of ourselves.
I am fully aware that it is not my duty to teach people how to love me— that if someone truly loves me, there will always be a room for them to learn my love language. But recently, I learned that to be understood, we must first understand who we're talking to.
It's a lovely feeling to finally have someone you could share your wildest dreams without... See more