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She was imprisoned by two words: what if. What if I’d known she was dying? What if I’d known I was about to lose her? But what-ifs don’t empower us. T
Parents often say, “I’d die for my child.” I heard a few of the parents in the grief group express the wish to trade places with their deceased childr
Tzutijil-initiated shaman Martín Prechtel correctly tells us that grief -for a person, for a country, for an ideal- is praise because it is the natura
And as Emily Edlynn, a psychologist and the author of Autonomy-Supportive Parenting, told me, kids who feel like they have control over their life exp
What’s more, another study establishes that knowing that their parents value kindness above achievement protects kids’ well-being.
Children who feel valued in this way, and who believe that what they do adds value, generally come to understand that they matter. And a sense of matt
Death is a mirror in which the entire meaning of life is reflected Sogyal Rinpoje
As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die. (Federico García Lorca)
When I interviewed Andrea Gibson last year, they shared a line that they loved from a poem by Saul Williams: “only believers in death will die.” When
the beauty of that is just capturing life as it unfolds capturing moments how people relate to each other that's my favorite kind of way to work is ju
Honesty is a strange aesthetic criterion to prioritize. Great confessional art was never about accurately representing reality, but about giving voice
...To be a photographer, one must photograph. No amount of book learning, no checklist of seminars attended, can substitute for the simple act of maki
“We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and the
Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It
In only three generations, children in the British Isles as well as the United States have lost their freedom to roam, their independently explorable
Boredom, lust, embarrassment, resentment, confusion, euphoria, anger, ambivalence… everything is amplified in the febrile, white-hot heat of adolescen
Putnam believed that the single biggest risk factor was the growing amount of time people spent alone. Even back when he wrote Bowling Alone—before sm
“Life runs on sunlight. Life rewards cooperation. Life builds from the bottom up. Life banks on diversity. Life recycles everything. Life builds resil
What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.
Think about rituals each season to celebrate the arrival of spring or the harvest, think about rituals of gratitude and abundance each day to remember
THEN Almitra spoke again and said, And what of Marriage, master? And he answered saying: You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore
And yet, as is often the case, those of us who need love so badly at a particular moment can be off-putting to those who want to love us, and to those
Two loves hold reality and make our universe unique to the rest: tetrahedron → “hollywood love” hypertetrahedron/pentachoron/5-cell → “real love“ —88
So much value and love for the process of writing and what it does for the coherence between heart, brain, imagination, lived reality, unseen, and see
You can’t write a viral essay that says “it’s complicated and I’m not sure.” But this is the only path to truly novel insight.
Writing is a task that takes both objective and subjective intelligence. LLMs ace the objective parts the same way they ace every test; you can’t faul
In Syracuse, 2,500 years ago, there was a famous teacher of rhetoric named Corax. This new discipline was in high demand: mastery of persuasive speaki
“Notice that, while lots of people are happy to tell you about Golden Ages, nobody ever seems to think one is happening right now. Maybe that’s becaus
There was a monk in the Buddha’s time, it is said, who originally came from an extremely wealthy aristocratic family. Because he had lived a very pamp
A conversation between Alex Dobrenko and Douglas Rushkoff on the spiritual nature of awe, rescuing the human from the machine, and why the future depe
We've fallen for the trap of thinking something doesn't exist if it isn't on the Internet. Maria Popova: "The internet is a surface level of the oce
A person spends years trying to become beautiful online. They finally achieve the exact face, body, lifestyle, and aesthetic they once fantasized abou
the best relationships consist of a series of unbreachable private understandings
convinced that adults have totally forgotten how to have fun in conversation. every conversation is either "checklist catch up on life events" or "gr
What is love? Ask 19 geniuses. Get 19 answers. • Plato: It's remembering a soul. • Freud: It's desire in disguise. • Buddha: It's letting go. • Nietz
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” wrote the literary critic Fredric Jameson. One of the hardest elements to im
While serving a life sentence in jail, Kaczynski wrote a little-known sequel to his manifesto, entitled “Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How”. In it he
As a society, we are so fully invested in capitalism, competition and algorithms that it’s almost impossible to pull ourselves out of the cycle to see
Sociologists bemoaned the death of the third place in American Life. Then companies shifted to remote work, and we got rid of second places. We just l
But we can build the kind of world where they don’t have to suffer because of the vagaries of fate, where we decide as a society that people shouldn’t
The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the
First, we climb the school ladder. Then we climb the corporate ladder. And then we climb the status ladder. We go from cradle to cubicle to casket,
What gets clicks becomes what gets made. The edges get sanded down. Originality gives way to imitation. Junk food wins, so everyone starts cooking cra
It takes yesterday’s trends, remixes them with today’s keywords, and spits out tomorrow’s mediocrity. It’s not thinking. It’s rehashing. Recursively,
We must choose the “longest way round” because meaning is neither fast nor viral nor optimized.It’s made. Slowly. Painfully. Honestly.By humans.
But what felt new was the speed and violence with which language now manifests markets. I’d sit in meetings as a single phrase “AI-native vertical Saa
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, a
That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rathe
5/ You try to figure things out rather than feel through them How do you drop a hot frying pan? You feel it, and you will let go. All your bad hab
rich people want to be cool and cool people want to be rich and everyone just wants to be a little less anxious
Unsettled is a good word to describe the weirdness of modern life, and I think one of the main reasons many of us feel unsettled is because no one fee
It’s important to note that life wasn’t always like that! To the contrary, we only very recently – in a tiny, tiny, recent part of humanity’s history
The paradigm of acceleration fails to grasp the deeper human tension between action and contemplation. It’s a false binary, one that Benedict XVI (the
I didn’t feel comfortable inside the endlessness of it. I am the kind of writer who believes in taking the time I need to come up with something worth
“Life is always winking at us, calling our attention to the beauty hidden in plain sight. Why do we so often miss what’s right in front of us, lost in
The writer Ted Chiang was once asked in an interview if he ever considered publishing more frequently. Chiang, one of the greatest living fiction writ
In-group bias (or us-versus-them thinking) is a concrete example. We tend to treat those we deem as outgroups as if they are incidental, in our way. W
At the most basic, some things that we know to be potential objects of experience – sounds at particularly high or low frequencies, for example – are
When you wake each morning, you not only become freshly aware of your thoughts, you also resituate yourself in your body. We don’t experience the worl
Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory inpu
Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress - by kyla scanlon
What we’re seeing isn’t just a media trend. It’s a shift in the architecture of power. Attention → Speculation → Allocation. This is the new supply ch
Many people were outraged by what they regarded as his non-parliamentary use of medieval laws to raise money. The most notorious was ship money. This
“So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This h
“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the over
Spirituality is experiencing who you are beyond small mental definitions, rituals, relationships. For this reason it renders traditional religion impo
“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” — Søren Kierkegaard
Kind Words is arguably the best game for any person feeling lonely, as it can be enjoyed even by non-gamers. The objective is to write and receive let
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness? (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
it is very Good™️ to have many many small moments of connection - a hello, a goodbye, a ‘have a good day’, a bit of chitchat - with each person we enc
i live my life this way. almost every day is full of multiple tiny interactions with no aim beyond a hello, a how are you, a smile and then i continue
A leading indicator of personal growth is how curious you are able to be with all your emotions - especially the ones you weren't allowed to feel as a
a big theme from opening sessions at @bowmansschool is the importance of paying attention to your feelings a few people have said they don't have acc
How to be more emotionally intelligent (without trying so hard) 🧵 for @threadapalooza
The most competent people I know are pretty good at basically anything they put their minds to, because they just design a process and run it. I think
social media will never be the impetus for real social change. He compared Twitter unfavorably to the civil rights movement. The Woolworth’s lunch cou
It's hard to save the world voluntarily when others are destroying it full-time.
What if we re-embraced activism as the intentional acts carried out by each generation to guide us from legacy narratives to new challenger narratives
And there’s a lot of positive evidence. It’s not that there’s some metaphysical concept of beauty that rules the world — beauty is a human experience.
It is that the attribute we call beauty is of two kinds. One is a parochial kind of attractiveness, local to a species, to a culture or to an individu
Aesthetics are your problem and mine. Nobody else’s. The fact of the matter is I want everything we do, that I do personally, that our office does, to
No one talks about the way in which the world, in all of its bewildering capability, is, at every second, offering some detail that might lead to a ne
“to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certai
hello, i'm v good at asking questions. it's one of the things i get most complimented on i think what i do is simple & easy for anyone to do: 1.
Intelligence is a form of friendship with the world. It can’t be cultivated out of fear of it.
What the Dzogchen teachings make clear, however, is that thinking about what is beyond thought is still thinking, and a glimpse of selflessness is gen
Zen can essentially be reduced to three things. Everything changes; everything is interconnected; pay attention to it.
Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are g
I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Ze
Although my work as a nonduality teacher is aligned with the shentong view, I do not speak of fundamental consciousness as a metaphysical reality. I c
Nonduality has become a popular teaching in the contemporary spiritual field. Although there are varying, conflicting perspectives and practices now o
Replace self-centeredness with unconditional love. "You" do not achieve unconditional love when "you" are the self-centered story. Unconditional love
Becoming enlightened, in the Buddhist sense of the term, would entail wholly ridding yourself of the twin illusions from which people tend to suffer: