Too many businesses don’t really understand that the core of their business is making people feel good. Whether it’s walking into a store or a restaurant, or being on an airplane, most people go through life hoping that good things will happen to them, and they return to businesses that make those things happen.
Our reverence for independence takes no account of the reality of what happens in life: sooner or later, independence will become impossible. Serious illness or infirmity will strike. It is as inevitable as sunset. And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?
If you write to please others, you are selling out. You are in the process of audience capture. This way of talking, which is how the fear in me talks, is common—as if writing for an audience and writing for yourself are at odds with each other. I really used to feel like that.
But I no longer think that it is quite right. The relationship between... See more
"It is a cruel and fundamentally inhuman tragedy that the culture has convinced so many of us that we must be healed in isolation, because being surrounded by people — people who love us, or care for us, or are willing to sit in the same room with us while we clean up our messes — is about the only way that I, for one, have ever been able to get... See more