Sublime

If only projects give us reason to live, as Williams suggests, what I have described as a midlife crisis is simply the human condition.

Seligman’s book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (New York: Atria Books, 2012).

Eric realized he was investing in outcomes by making sure other people were always happy with him. This had prevented Eric from standing up to people who mistreated him, but it also prevented him from getting genuinely close with anyone and sharing things about himself they might not like. Eric decided to end his loneliness by opening

ethologically oriented psychiatrists have begun to study what they call psychobiological response patterns and deeply homologous neural structures which they hold responsible for the achievement of healthy or unhealthy patterns of adjustment in individual patients in response to variations in their social environment.

Ernest Becker's extraordinary book, The Denial of Death.

Those new disciplines are neuroscience, the study of how the brain supports mental processes; developmental psychopathology, the study of the impact of adverse experiences on the development of mind and brain; and interpersonal neurobiology, the study of how our behavior influences the emotions, biology, and mind-sets of those around us.

‘Shit life syndrome’ (SLS), as the doctors call it, is when ‘finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources … It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.’