Drama is an interesting (pun intended) concept: the idea of eventful experiences in life that are worth talking about. “Bob went to the store and bought a gallon of milk,” is not interesting. It’s a statement of fact to convey information. Now, one way to spice it up is through plot: “Bob went to the store and bought a gallon of milk only to find...
Read MoreThe difference between a shelter and a prison is who controls the lock. If you control the lock, you can protect yourself from things and people who could negatively impact your life. If someone else controls the lock, they can keep you from leaving and let anyone inside with you who could do your
Read MoreThere is a famous condition known as Munchausen’s. It is a fancy way of saying that a person is faking a condition to gain sympathy. There is another one, Munchausen’s by proxy, where a person pretends that a dependent has an illness so that they can take care of them and be a hero. As life becomes easier and less risky, people need to create...
Read MoreEmotions are human responses to internal and external stimuli. They provide both a signal to react to certain conditions in your environment and a reward or incentive for beneficial behaviors (or punishment for harmful behaviors). Freud put it best in his Pleasure Principle that people seek pleasure and avoid pain, but to broaden that point out...
Read MoreThere are two famous books, The Power of Habit and Atomic Habits, that go into detail around how to break or change a habit. This won’t be a rehash of those books, though I do recommend reading them if you’re interested in how habits are formed and how they stick. All that is needed to know for this post is that a habit involves a trigger that...
Read MoreI’ve written a lot about my beef with The Four Noble Truths, which is famously translated into English to communicate that life is suffering and the cause of all suffering is desire. It goes on to explain that if you detach from that desire—and, ideally, from all desire—you will let go of that suffering and reach a state of peace. Now, apologists...
Read MoreMeaning is subjective; as such, you can decide that something has significance to you or decide that everything is stupid and meaningless. While this sounds like nothing in life really matters, it’s actually more positive than that. The best takeaway for your mental health and well-being is that you can take anything your life, find its meaning...
Read MoreI wrote in a previous post about the ethics of selfishness and altruism. Effectively, it’s a misconception that selfishness is always bad and altruism is always good; you need to be selfish enough to take care of yourself so that you are not a burden on others, and being altruistic when it harms you is not necessarily a good thing, either. But I...
Read MoreThe haves vs. the have-nots. The majority vs. the minority. Good vs. evil. It seems like everything in life is turned into a conflict between two forces where one has to win and the other has to lose. Unfortunately, this taps into deep human psychology regarding everything from our fight-or-flight response to our tendency toward tribalism to feel...
Read MoreI wrote in my previous post about how people focus more on screaming for others to change than thinking about things that they can do. There’s no doubt that most people care about issues—even though many are either pretending or grossly exaggerating their concern (The Office poked fun at this well when Ryan falsely professed his deep love for...
Read More