Kahneman’s evidence shows that we suck at remembering and predicting our own well-being. We as a culture still ignore this empirical evidence, recommending to live our lives so as to avoid deathbed regrets. Deathbed regrets are like Hollywood films...
War did not come like a hurricane, Rorimer realized, destroying everything in its path. It came like a tornado, touching down in patches, taking with it one life while leaving the next person unharmed.
Are you repeating someone else's narrative, taking it for granted? Talk therapy sessions and 12-step recovery shares help develop the ability to present a coherent life narrative through the safe structure of clear rules of communication that support...
What about young age? You will be miserable all through your 15 years to reach that goal of $10 million. After 50 years, even if you pay a million to get back a week of your time at 35, you will never get that. Your beer will taste very different whe...
America runs on credit darling. Why do you worry, our credit will take care of this payment. It is not saving or cash in hand that matters. We do not need cash, we just need potential. The system in the US believes in potential. That is the model of ...
For years, I worked seven-day weeks, through birthdays and most public holidays, Christmases and New Year’s Eves included. I worked mornings and afternoons, resuming work after dinner. I remember feeling as if life were a protracted exercise in pul...
If you rob too much from one person, it becomes murder. If you steal little by little, it looks like business. Just find a way to refine it. The Internet has made it possible to connect to the whole world via one platform. Steal a penny from each per...
Choice, and all its attendant energy, is a characteristic of youth. It is before one chooses that one feels desire and longing without fulfillment, which gives an edge to any artistic endeavor. Galway Kinnell recently said in an interview that a youn...
Love, marriage, divorce, infidelity... life was the same here as anywhere else, wasn't? She realized now wrong she'd been; the pali wasn't a headstone and Kalaupapa wasn't a grave. It was a community like any other, bound by ties deeper than most, an...
In Freud’s story our possibilities for satisfaction depend upon our capacity for frustration; if we can’t let ourselves feel our frustration – and, surprisingly, this is a surprisingly difficult thing to do – we can’t get a sense of what it...
Purify your intentions, your inner being, your heart and be sincere in your actions,’ he wrote. ‘God looks into your heart, not at your outer form. He looks at what lies behind the clothes … He looks into your private sphere, not at your public...
The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November.
the essence of the Hajj is Arafat. On the ninth day of the Hajj month all pilgrims gather on the great Plain of Arafat to offer their deepest heartfelt prayers. It’s a reminder of Resurrection, when everyone will stand “naked” before God on Jud...
As pilgrims we effectively slip into the role of our spiritual ancestress and run back and forth between the hills seven times. This symbolises our own quest in this world for whatever we are seeking and God’s Mercy which fulfils our quest even bey...
Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh a...
When you see that earthly powers are not listening to you, that you are under siege in this city for four years and shot at without the international community doing anything to help, what should you do? Die?’ he asked me in the course of our conve...
Why do you want a new truth when you do not practice what you already know? Far better to read a few books and make them your own than to read many books quickly and superficially.
Yes, but the artist?" said Nigel almost fiercely. "He's different, you know he is. He's driven by some compulsion: if he can't do what he knows he has to do with his life he might as well be dead. He's got to break through the world's indifference, o...
This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity, and if he writes what occurs to him...
It made Daniel think. The people who had the least were the most willing to share. He outlined a dictum that he would believe the rest of his life: the more people have, the less the give. Similarly, generous cultures produce less waste because exces...
You must have been working very hard here, with so few distractions.” Mary’s eyes darkened and she looked away. “Not quite as much as I hoped for. At times the loneliness and the unanswered questions can get overwhelming, like very loud voices ...
