Patricia Mou

Working together can also be an extremely enriching and sobering experience. It is enriching because people learn, gain traction, motivation and a sense of meaning. It’s sobering because it provides a real-world test to the quality and strength of the coordination fabric your group has been building, stripping away the relative comfort of... See more

I have taken a lot of happiness from a sense - often grandiose and sometimes illusory - that I am, by my various actions, helping create a future that will be more free, more tolerant, more open, and more just.

There are Twitter threads made by anonymous writers which contain more insight than most published academic papers, and memes which capture the human condition better than most works found in art galleries.

Do the work.  That's all the productivity advice you need, and the only useful productivity advice you're ever going to get.

The linear approach imagines that the meaning of our lives can be reduced to a mission, like the kind that fixes saints, heroes and social reformers in the historical imagination.

Sometimes, learning what you don’t want might be as important as discovering what you do. That’s growing, too.

Tribes are living organisms. Even if nobody joins or leaves, members of the group change and the world around the group changes. Your rules, norms and goals will evolve. 

Note that seeking happiness as an end might be counterproductive. Many people report that constantly checking to see if they are happy actually decreases their happiness - a report that fits with the research on "flow." It may be better to seek some of the above goals as ends, and happiness will be a side-effect.