juliana ong

This is one of those polarities I'm learning to embrace: that you can see improvement in many things, but still you never really stop worrying; you just get better at dealing with it.

it’s so easy to derail our own joy by looking around at someone else’s life or worse — the imaginary life we think we should have by now

Women are in the midst of a revolutionary reckoning with our ambitions. We’re not resigning en masse—because who can afford to quit her job in this economy?!—but we are trying to figure out a new set of goals and guidance for our professional lives. Thanks to long-simmering inequality and stubborn sexism, clarified by the pain of the pandemic, our ... See more

Clichés are just a cynic's characterisation of timeless and essential wisdom.

We’ve been told that the meaning of life is self-actualisation, to achieve some perfect state of mental health and productivity. Don’t commit until you have perfect control. But I think that way of thinking will backfire. Because the end point of trying to control everything is you become like a machine: emotionally detached, hyper-productive, supe... See more

The outcome of any concerted attempt at self-knowledge could be presumed to be a deep understanding of ourselves. But strangely, the real outcome is rather different. It appears that the more closely we explore our minds, the more we start to see how many tricks these organs can play on us – and therefore the more we will appreciate how often we ar

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