I’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 MoreMost people focus on the “why” in life as the big questions—mainly because they feel more personal, more subjective, and more unanswerable and so they can be analyzed for a lifetime. But “how” questions are just as interesting, just in a different way and susceptible to the human arc of
Read MoreOne of my first ever blog posts was about creating a “life architecture roadmap”—in other words, assessing the current state of your life and identifying your desired future state so that you could create a roadmap filled with practical next steps and milestones to get there. The idea is a play on Enterprise Architecture, a discipline in which...
Read MoreOne of my favorite psychology studies of all time is the one where they give the test group a plant to take care of in their elderly home and then provide a plant for the control group that is taken care of by a staff member. The results were stark: the group who had the responsibility for taking care of the plant lived much, much longer than the...
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 MoreIn the immortal words of Creed Bratton of The Office, “If I can’t SCUBA, then what has this all been about? What am I working toward?” While this is quotation is meant to be funny since a man working an office job (with plenty of references to drugs, murder, and other seedy activities during the workday) for decades was all leading up to a...
Read MoreThis is a difficult post for me because my mind immediately goes to everything that's difficult for me to be disciplined about: I know that there are many more for others, from calling their friends and family to saving money every paycheck to doing their homework. There are many things in life that require frequent or strenuous work to attain or...
Read MoreThere is a long list of questions that people ask that show a genuine misunderstanding of how life exists in the universe—or, if they do understand it, an unwillingness to accept this law of physics. Questions include: The most common manifestation of this in modern times is when people look around, see someone better off than them, and then...
Read MoreOne of the most interesting ideas in positive psychology over the last couple of decades is the idea of “manufactured happiness”—that is, the idea that your brain makes yourself happier as a result of certain behaviors. Daniel Gilbert, who has done a lot of research on happiness and choice, conducted one study on this topic that assessed an...
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...
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