“The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots?” “Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life,” Virginia Woolf wrote as she considered how our illusions keep us alive, shining a sidewise gleam on…
Once our basic physical needs for sustenance and shelter are met, most of our psychological suffering is a problem of selfing — contracting the scope of reality to the pinhole of the self and using that to explain, always painfully, the actions and motives of others, the course and causality of events. As this cognitive…
“Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place.” “Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the great Scottish…
One way to argue against increasing taxes (or having any taxes at all) is to contend that to increase the taxes of the wealthy against their wishes would be coercion. There are more hyperbolic ways to make this sort of argument, such as asserting that taxes are robbery by the state. However, I will use…
An earlier version of this article appeared on October 15, 2015 Of all the strategies for habit formation I’ve explored, the Strategy of Clarity took me the longest to fully appreciate. It seems almost too simple. But once I understood how much work it was actually doing, I couldn’t stop seeing it everywhere. Habits are…
