We’ve reached what Tocqueville described: downright egotism. It’s the ideological wall I find impossible to scale: I don’t know how to make you care about other people.

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We ar

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I think this is probably an experience that many, many, particularly women but probably others feel, is the sense of loss of who we essentially are because of the requirements of what we do. And so I think a lot of people were really funny, and I think a lot of people were really silly, and I think a lot of people were really playful.

One of the fundamental choices that you face on Earth is the degree to which you’ll pursue deeper but riskier fulfillment or practice avoidance that exempts you from bad feelings but leaves you bereft of good ones.

But what if you’re under the influence of bad systems? What if we all are? What if we take a minute to laugh at how hard we defend our right to want things when we can barely explain why we want them in the first place, beyond “I like this”? Can we deconstruct those wants in a non-judgy but curious sort of way? Or maybe delight in the absurdity of ... See more

Stopping to ask yourself, “why do I like this?” can give you answers that unlock even more than you initially thought. By slowly building up a strong sense of personal taste, it creates confidence in that taste.

A number of psychological theories have been advanced to explain chronic worry. One of the most prominent is called the avoidance model, which explains how worry can become obsessive and intrusive in our lives. This model argues that inveterate worriers replace thoughts of clear outcomes of problems, especially potentially catastrophic ones, with a... See more

“I’m just thinking that ... nobody goes for a walk without there being something that supports that walk outside of ourselves. And that maybe we have a false idea that the able-bodied person is somehow radically self-sufficient.”

“I think the reason there’s such good juicy kitchen gossip, and so much connection happens in the kitchen, is because you are usually kind of doing something repetitive, and that releases something in your mind that creates a space that doesn’t just reside in the brain, but also is something that becomes part of the body. And how often do we do tha... See more