juliana ong

Here’s something I’m very thankful I was told while I was still in my 20s: that the point of all this “hard work” is to recognize the person it makes you, not what it “gets” you

“I think more generally our problem is a progressive culture where we are afraid to say what is decent moral conduct, where we can’t really call out what is undignified or distasteful anymore, where we’re terrified to enforce any ethical expectations.”

You need some shared philosophy of what constitutes a meaningful life to sustain friendship over time. Why live here? Why work in this industry? What are we afraid of? What are we hopeful about? Do you know me, see me? Will you tell me when I’m wrong?

It is very tempting to believe that because you are twenty-something and struggling, the world is conspiring against you. But sometimes, the pain we feel in life is not from people holding us back, but our own inability to deal with their indifference.3 In other words: no one is out to get you. They just don’t care that much. This is both a little ... See more

There’s a real tension in love — at the beginning of love, particularly — between the desire to be honest about who one is and the desire to win the affection of another person. Of course, ideally, we can both be honest and loved for being honest. That’s the dream.

Romantic love finds its most passionate expression in private where only one particular person can “unperplex” the other

In the age of being extremely online, comparison is at our fingertips and low self-esteem can be temporarily cured with a quick internet applause. What I’m getting at is, I don’t think we’re talking enough about the importance of getting really, really quiet.

In the area of thought, there is the intellectual who discusses his or her personal problems as though they belong to someone else. In a state of total dissociation, this individual does not experience the emotional meaning of anything he or she says or hears; such an individual prefers to talk about psychology in general rather than his or her ago

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