Amy Life

These aren’t achievements so much as acquisitions, and acquisitions, while thrilling to the acquirer, are profoundly boring to the rest of us.

Or they hit you with a smug “It depends.” Which is meant to sound nuanced and intellectual but is actually the “Go girl, give us nothing!” of conversation.

So why don’t people talk more? Epley continued his research and came up with an answer to the mystery: We don’t start conversations because we’re bad at predicting how much we’ll enjoy them. We underestimate how much others want to talk; we underestimate how much we will learn; we underestimate how quickly other people will want to go deep and get

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The perfect combination of realism and hope. Let’s call it gratitude.

To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness.