This Is How To Find Meaning In Life: 5 Secrets From Research
w and then, we all have those nights. It's a little too late and your brain starts asking way too many questions, auditing your life at the time when it's least generous. Until finally it lands on The Question: "Is this it?" Not that your life is bad. You got some of the good stuff. Not all of it, but a decent amount. Job. Relationships. But why the heck does everything still feel a little bit… empty? For something resembling…
9 minutes
How To Stay Happy: 4 Secrets From History’s Happiest Philosopher
coming happy isn't hard. Ice cream usually does the trick. Staying happy, now there's a challenge. Often, it doesn't take much for us to lose our cool and let positive feelings slip away. That said, there's plenty of advice out there on becoming happy, but not too much on staying happy. So who can help us? I know a guy… Baruch Spinoza. Born in 1632. His family fled to Amsterdam to escape the Portuguese Inquisition. Now Baruch was quite the…
9 minutes
This Is How To Get What You Really Want: 6 Secrets From Research
ere’s something you want. And you think to yourself, "Once I get it, everything’s gonna change!" And you get it. Boom. You feel fantastic. Your brain does a little victory lap around the inside of your skull. But the feeling doesn’t last. The magic gradually fades away. So what do you do then? "Well, uh, I must have wanted the wrong thing! A different thing will do the trick. A better thing." A different job, car, relationship, country. And once…
10 minutes
This Is How To Live A Good Life: 5 Secrets From Ancient Wisdom
w do we live a good life? Gahhhhhhhhh. Why don’t we ever deal with easy questions on this blog, huh? Who decides this stuff? (Don’t answer that.) Look, alright, nobody, and I mean NOBODY, knows what they’re doing. I spent the first few decades of my life thinking everybody else received a Secret Pamphlet and that this pamphlet explained how to file taxes and when to leave a party and how to love someone without ruining it. I didn’t get…
9 minutes
This Is How To Overcome Burnout: 5 Secrets From Philosophy
’s a Saturday afternoon. There’s nothing you’re supposed to be doing. No deadline looming. But there’s a voice in your head: "You should be accomplishing something." Who is that voice? Where the heck is it coming from? A philosopher named Byung-Chul Han has a theory… There was a time when society’s main job was saying sit down, shut up, get in line, and good God, don’t touch that. Han calls this the disciplinary society. That world hasn’t totally vanished, but…
9 minutes
The Uncomfortable Reason You Keep Self-Sabotaging: 6 Secrets From Philosophy’s Most Honest Madman
y do we so frequently self-sabotage? The usual answers can’t be accurate. We're far too good at it for that. Too consistent. Some part of us must be quietly invested in staying stuck. But nobody will say that to our faces. Aaaaaaactually, come to think of it, I know a guy who would… If you saw Slavoj Žižek shuffling through an airport, muttering about ideology and wiping his nose, you wouldn’t say, “There goes someone with practical advice for living.”…
9 minutes
How To Get Unstuck: 6 Secrets From Philosophy
fe is hard. At birth you were issued a body that breaks down, a mind that talks back, a limited number of Tuesdays, and an unkillable suspicion that everybody else got a more thorough orientation packet. Nobody’s coming to fix this. What do we do? Well, here’s a thought so unfashionable it’s got a decent chance of being true: some of the best advice on how to live was written over a century ago by a guy who is now…
10 minutes
The Counterintuitive Way To Get Better At Anything
while back, I posted about David Epstein’s new book, which breaks down how constraints can help us live better lives. Ironically, making things a little harder can lead to increased productivity, creativity, and happiness. This resonated with a lot of readers, but many were understandably hesitant to deliberately make their lives more difficult. (Apparently, this was a task that, up to this point, the world had handled for them just fine.) So the most common reply I got was:…
9 minutes
