What lies ahead is a remarkable but wearisome journey [on a] runaway train. No one can tell you what lies ahead, least of all those who remain behind. One thing, however, they can assure you of is that it’s not a round trip. Try, therefore, to derive some comfort form the notion that no matter how unpalatable this or that station may turn out to … [ Read more ]
Author: Joseph Brodsky | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
What’s good about boredom, about anguish and the sense of the meaninglessness of your own, of everything else’s existence, is that it is not a deception.
Author: Joseph Brodsky | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Life & Society
What is boredom if not the howl of need, the need for significance.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Life & Society
Although our habits and patterns, which hinge on repetition, give shape to our days, they can also become a prison as the vitalizing rhythm of repetition ossifies into monotonous repetitiveness.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
True independence involves release from the subjugation of personal urges and weaknesses. We must stand up to our destructive desires to spend more than we have, to drink more than we should, to admire our own image, to fritter away our time, to seek the admiration of others.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Figuring out healthy ways (in all senses) to deal with boredom and aloneness (which may or may not equate to loneliness) is a key life skill. Productivity and pleasure seeking are the most common approaches, but not necessarily the best, especially if done to excess. Ideally, first learn how to be at peace with your boredom, silence, and aloneness, and then figure out alternatives to … [ Read more ]
Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
When life becomes tedious to you, [Søren Kierkegaard] argued, you don’t need to look outside for something to shake up your malaise. You need instead to look inward and find what’s missing within your own heart and soul.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Two things define you: your patience when you have nothing and your attitude when you have everything.
Author: George Bernard Shaw | Subjects: Character, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
You can do the right things for the wrong reasons and the wrong things for the right reasons. Neither is satisfying, so always consider your reasons and your actions in tandem.
Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Concepts, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Liberated from social pressures and constraints, solitude can help you understand better what kind of person you are and what your life is for. In this way you become independent of others. You find your own path, your own voice.
Author: Stephen Batchelor | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement
There are three main elements that can influence the outcomes of [difficult] conversations: issues, interests and identity.
Author: Chengyi Lin | Source: Insead Knowledge | Subjects: Communication, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Relationships
Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.
Author: Shane Parrish | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
The terrible three things in a relationship are insecurity, jealousy, the need to control.
Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Relationships
People have an amazing ability to see hypocrisy in others but not themselves.
Author: Jeff Blum | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
Basic trust in the personal and in the physical world that surrounds him is the air that the child must breathe if he is to have roots for his own sense of identity and for the related sense of his place in the world. As he gradually differentiates the world of in here from the world of out there he is constantly testing the coherence, … [ Read more ]
Author: Helen Merrell Lynd | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Family & Friends, Life & Society
Because personality is rooted in unconscious and unquestioned trust in one’s immediate world, experiences that shake trusted anticipations and give rise to doubt may be of lasting importance… Shattering of trust in the dependability of one’s immediate world means loss of trust in other persons, who are the transmitters and interpreters of that world. We have relied on the picture of the world they have … [ Read more ]
Author: Helen Merrell Lynd | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Part of the difficulty in admitting shame to oneself arises from reluctance to recognize that one has built on false assumptions about what the world one lives in is and about the way others will respond to oneself… Shame over a sudden uncovering of incongruity mounts when what is exposed is inappropriate positive expectation, happy and confident commitment to a world that proves to be … [ Read more ]
Author: Helen Merrell Lynd | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
What makes shame most unbearable is this feeling of sudden expatriation from reality, which leaves trust — in oneself, in the world — dangerously jeopardized. Paradoxically, it is often not the darkest but the brightest in us that is most vulnerable to shame.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Part of what makes shame so misunderstood and underinvestigated is that it is often conflated with guilt. Although the two may complement and reinforce one another, guilt tends to arise from the feeling of wrongdoing, of having transgressed a boundary, while shame stems from the feeling of falling short, of failing to reach a hope or meet an expectation, which anchors it in a deeper … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
James Baldwin wrote, with anger and pity, about the Black experience of seeing white people as “the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.” He understood whites, and white Christians in particular, to be trapped in a kind of self-induced psychosis, stemming from the strain of sustaining a conception of themselves as repentant sinners while living lives of indifference and violence toward their fellow Black … [ Read more ]
Authors: James Baldwin, Robert P. Jones | Source: Time | Subject: Race Relations