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Reading List – On Life
The Economic Pain Is Everywhere, Even in Your Halloween Candy
A lot of the internet’s response to Lindy West’s memoir, “Adult Braces,” centers on the claim that West is being manipulated or coerced into polyamory. She made complicated decisions, but the decisions were fully her own (and, yes, took a “budget ‘Eat, Pray, Love’” trip to arrive at). Some of the worst things people have said online are ones she already anticipated and wrote about in the book. But the underlying assumption of these criticisms is that relationships are a final destination, rather than something that evolves—or ends. And look, I hope West’s throuple does work out. But it might not! And that wouldn’t be a moral failure. That’s just life!
What to Make of a Life: Why Founders Must Build a Life, Not Just a Company
Every life has cliffs. Every founder journey has them too. A cliff is a moment when the old path breaks, ends, or becomes uncertain. It may be a failed project, a lost customer, a business dispute, a regulatory shock, a health scare, a partnership breakdown, a cash flow crisis, a family responsibility, or a change in market direction. Sometimes the cliff is visible. Sometimes it arrives slowly, through exhaustion, loss of meaning, or the realization that the old way of working no longer fits. This matters because companies change. Markets change. Teams change. Technologies change. Regulations change. The founder’s own stage of life also changes. What worked at age thirty may not work at age forty-five. What gave energy in the early years may need redesign later. The founder must learn how to reconstruct, not only how to push harder. In fog, the temptation is to demand instant clarity. But real clarity often comes step by step. The useful response is not paralysis, and it is not reckless movement. It is disciplined exploration. A founder can ask: what is the next small step that will create more information? Which conversation should I have? What experiment can I run? What data do I need? What responsibility must I not ignore? What must I stop doing to see more clearly? Who can help me think with honesty?
Carl Jung and the Spiritual Problem of the Modern Individual
Casting aside these religions has had many effects, but the one which Jung saw as most pressing, was the fact that it forced countless people to face the existential dilemmas of human life without the helpful crutch of religious dogma.
Laura Kipnis
“What allows for scandal in Kipnis’s schema is every individual’s blind spot, “a little existential joke on humankind (or in some cases, a ticking time bomb) nestled at the core of every lonely consciousness … Ostensibly about scandal, her book is most memorable as a convincing case for the ultimate unknowability of the self”
Laura Kipnis’s “How to Become a Scandal,” reviewed by Ellen McCarthy
“the elaborate ways those transgressors reassure themselves that they are not bringing colossal ruin upon themselves, that their dalliances will never see the light of day”
Life Lessons From Lenin
It’s a strange fact, but however certain you are of a thing, having enough people tell you you’re wrong can shake even the surest mind. Psychologists call this the Asch effect . I had studied it as a grad student.
Life After The Devil Wears Prada
Andy lived in a moral universe of very clean trade-offs. She stepped into a version of herself she didn’t entirely like and then stepped right back out again, unchanged. I admire her confidence. I also now understand that life doesn’t work that way. Adults do not lose themselves in a single dramatic moment. We adapt—incrementally, even reasonably—until one day we look up and think, Huh. Interesting set of priorities I’ve assembled here.
Truth is, if Chukwueze had scored that goal, even the chewing gum and everything that came with it would have been interpreted differently.
It would have passed for confidence…the swagger of a modern player who knows how to score stylishly. But such is life and societal judgment: success makes room for some of your shortcomings. In failure, however, even the air you breathe is questioned.
The deed is done; only lessons remain to be learned. Let us appreciate the boys for a wonderful outing
Warren Buffett has built a legacy on smart investing, sharp wit, and, apparently, relationship advice that’s as practical as his portfolio strategy
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Buffett sees marriage the way he sees business partnerships—choose wisely, because it will shape everything else in your life.
My Nigerian mother and my English father modelled hard work in a way that I never understood growing up.
My dad worked a full time job late into the evening and when his work was done, he would go and join my mum at her job in a small, hot, fast-paced restaurant kitchen until the early hours of the morning. They came home when I was asleep and went to work when I was asleep. When my mum left the restaurant, she opened a corner shop called KJS and would work all day and all night. She would end up sleeping in the back room of the corner shop on a bag of rice because local kids would break in, steal things and vandalise the shop because she was pretty much the only black women in the area. My dad again, would finish his full time job, and go straight to my mum’s shop and help her until late into the night. The most remarkable part of this, isn’t just the fact that they worked 7-days a week to provide for their family. It was their attitude towards their work. They never ever described or viewed what they did as hard work. I never ever heard them complain even once about “working hard”. They seemed to view work as the ultimate privilege, honour and opportunity. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realised that they were my biggest professional inspirations and influence – not because they gave me profound advice like some parents do, but because they set a profound example without needing to say a word – one that has enabled me to pursue my own dreams with a level of focused gratitude that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. “My parents were tasked with the job of survival and I with self-actualisation.
What a luxury it is to search for purpose, meaning, and fulfilment.” – Bo Ren
BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC.
NEWS RELEASE
Carolyn Hax chat: Is it possible to be a happy working mom?
I (and you) don’t know that the therapist is saying to your husband. But I have a pretty good idea, if he’s doing his job, that he’s getting at the unhappiness and frustration that led your husband to sneak around on websites. And urging your husband to talk to you instead. Wouldn’t that make sense, when you see it spelled out that way?
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies
On social media, many of the most chaotic and emotionally lawless people you’ve ever known are posting on a regular basis about having at long last achieved inner peace. Many among us, after observing this cringe-inducing side effect of regular self-narration at mass scale, have given up altogether on sincere ideas of personal epiphany.
Peter Thiel’s Principles: Capture the Hidden Knowledge and Avoid Competition
Tradition is not an old order that we should abandon and consider only as a relic filled with conventions, but a kind of reference point that encourages us to go deeper.
Why do some people say Meryl Streep is overrated?
I have news for you: everything on earth that people can have a subjective opinion about will be called “overrated” by some people. Everything, and every person, no matter how beautiful or talented or successful or generally beloved. Nobody and nothing in the world is universally admired or appreciated. (Not even me!) Meryl Streep is one of the most acclaimed and awarded actors in the history of film. Hell, she’s received almost twice as many Oscar nominations as the next most nominated actors. When someone is at that level of acclaim or esteem, it’s not surprising that some people would get sick of them: “why does Meryl always get the Oscar nomination? Why don’t people shut up about how great she is? There are other actors I like better, whose movies I like better. Shut up about how awesome Meryl Streep is, she’s just not that special!” Sometimes nothing will get some people to hate you as efficiently as being a) extremely successful and b) adored by a majority. That’s all. (Meryl is not overrated, by the way. She’s brilliant, and she has earned all of her accolades.)
The Perks of Being Harvey Weinstein’s Publicist
“One of the reasons wokeism isn’t something I adhere to is because you can’t look at someone and say they’re awful because of one thing,” he said. “If I looked at things that way, everyone in my life I would have had to walk away from. I try to keep myself morally centered while I help other people who are not.”
Fooled by Randomness – by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny.
GANDHI’S BOSWELL”: Mahadev Desai (right) and Jardine, Revenue and Judicial Commissioner of the NWFP. PHOTO: THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY
Waking up before Gandhi in pre-dawn darkness, and going to sleep long after his Master, Desai lived Gandhi’s day thrice over — first in an attempt to anticipate it, next in spending it alongside Gandhi, and finally in recording it into his diary”.
In the ghetto or on a yacht?
Our society has no place for monks, communists, recusants, and individualists. We are a culture of survivalists who hoard wealth at the top or scavenge at the bottom
How Virtual Reality Died
Sure, there will be disruption . (Silicon Valley loves that word.) But reality will win. It always does, sooner or later.
How I Became the Honest Broker
I admit, with some shame, that all this appealed to me in my twenties. The idea that I could adopt a pose as a critic, and launch myself into some higher sphere of coolness—and maybe even hang out with superstars as part of the deal. . . . Well, that was why you picked this vocation in the first place. Wasn’t it? There were compromises, sure, but didn’t they exist in every field? I soothed my conscience by recalling what Hyman Roth tells Michael Corleone in The Godfather II: “Michael, this is the business we’ve chosen.” You get to swagger like a wiseguy, and grab whatever you can get your hands on, just so long as you’re willing to dispose of a few bodies along the way. I could play this game, was even good at it. I got published and started receiving some recognition for my talents. But I was troubled nonetheless. This didn’t feel right. It didn’t add up. Was this really the right way to do it?
How to Break Free from Dopamine Culture
Rituals cannot be uploaded or downloaded. They are sources of joy and stability in everyday life. Instead of the ceaseless quest for novelty embedded in scrolling, ritual offers the deeper satisfaction of mindful repetition. I believe Kierkegaard was correct when he claimed that we misunderstand repetition in the modern world. We fear that it leads to boredom. Yet the most powerful sources of happiness in our life will actually be the result of repetition—in family or vocational relationships, for example.
What do we do about Alice Munro now?
We don’t know what Munro thought or felt, and we never will. We only know what she did, which was monstrous, and what she wrote, which was beautiful.
Hollywood Medium Tyler Henry Has a Waiting List 600,000 People Long.
I would say for me, one of the greatest pieces of advice I was ever given is that someone told me, ‘Tyler, you can be the biggest, juiciest peach in the world and there’s still going to be people who hate peaches.’
Friedrich Nietzsche on Why a Fulfilling Life Requires Embracing Rather than Running from Difficulty.
Please help me understand Alan Watts later years and death
But in the end it is hard to practice Buddhism while existing in society. He had many complications and attachments: friends, family, career, money ect that buddhist monks do not. It is a incredible juggling act to both maintain worldy attachments and ones oneness with the universe.. This is all speculation on my part, and I do not mean to cast judgment or misrepresent the man’s existence.
When depression knocks at your door
A wondering: how powerful are we, even when we are in the throes of grief, pain, and desperation? In what ways can we tend to the proof of our power, more than we tend to the proof of our pain? If it’s possible to feel the depths of despair, isn’t it also possible to feel the length of bliss? The width of satisfaction? The magnitude of being here, being alive, together?
7 Truths For Navigating Your Dark Night Of The Soul Journey.
“I see everything in my life as guided by spirit. My ego gets in the way, but when I listen to the profound place within and live in alignment, I’m guided to exactly where I need to be. Even when I know, there have been times I’ve gotten off track and slipped back into the need for external validation and recognition. It hasn’t turned out very well, but I needed to experience that to learn something. Even though it’s agonizing, there’s been a lesson I was meant to learn.”
Waging Wellness. The path to build a healing world in
the shell of the unhealed.
An Amoral Manifesto (Part I)
There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God and hence the whole religious superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil. Just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Yet, as with the non-existence of God, we human beings can still discover plenty of completely-naturally-explainable internal resources for motivating certain preferences.
Fame
So my limited fame fills a hole, an old fear that I’d never amount to anything, I’d remain invisible and … alone. The hole leaks, though, so it never fills up. Recognition from strangers, as you age, feels increasingly like empty calories. The affection people have for you is for your public representative … it’s not really for you — they don’t know you. And if they did, they’d likely be disappointed. I believe the last sentence illustrates what people call impostor’s syndrome.
The 3 Paradoxes of Life (And How They Determine Who We Are)
Easier said than done. And remember, these don’t get rid of the struggles of life… they simply point your struggles in the right direction. These are skills that we must develop within ourselves. They must be practiced and perfected, like bowling or making funny ice sculptures. They are skills that help you use your dissatisfaction to your advantage rather than your disadvantage. Because these inherent tensions will always be within us and resolving them is a never-ending process—a tightrope that extends infinitely into the horizon. The best we can hope for is to simply get better at balancing.
![Don’t smoke, lie, complain, waste money, eat like crap, make bad/risky choices, argue too much, gossip, watch sad news, break promises, […] and you’ll be better off.](https://me.withchude.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/download-18-50.jpg "Reading List – On Life")
