We go to great lengths to disguise our misery. We are suffering deeply inside, but we do not want to see it or let it be seen. We try to hide it, not just from others, but also from ourselves. We tell...

The rules that govern our lives often feel solid and permanent. We believe we should follow these rules because they reflect the established way of doing things. We especially believe this when the ru...

Poetry is powerful because it takes us beyond the reaches of our everyday language. A poem is a text that points at something outside of it, something for which words are not enough. The more we use l...

You’re nobody’s fool. You’re not about to go through life with blinders on. You’re paying attention to everything that is happening, to your life and to the world. You see all of the forces in play, a...

Language is based on agreement. You and I can communicate only insofar as we agree on the meanings of the words we use. If you judge one of the words to have a different meaning than I judge it to hav...

We put enormous emphasis on optimizing quantities. Our attention is shackled to screens where we make certain numbers go up and other numbers go down. We want to measure everything so that we can cont...