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Posted on February 13, 2021 Leave a Comment
‘Better to have loved and lost / than to have never loved at all’ wrote Tennyson in his work In Memoriam, discerning the negative qualities of something do not necessarily discount or negate its positive ones. And so it is with a lover now gone. The pain one feels now should not justify deleting the […]
Posted on January 30, 2021 Leave a Comment
Your friend has just been dumped by their girlfriend. Limp, depressed, and possessed with a weltschmertz threatening to degenerate into total apathy to life, they begin telling you about their suffering, about how they miss those texts ‘good morning’ each day, and how – as is common when we have nothing left but memories to […]
Posted on January 29, 2021 Leave a Comment
In his work Man’s Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl remarks that while being able to imagine a future beyond the camps did not stop death, it did create the opportunity for life. He observed that with sufficient imagination, we can tolerate the intolerable. He was, after all, a survivor of the holocaust. While our problems […]
Posted on January 22, 2021 Leave a Comment
Nietzsche criticized those who wished to abolish suffering. As an outcast who lived by himself in a small cabin and died alone, he likely knew suffering well. But this does not mean he was necessarily unhappy with his life. Suffering, according to Nietzsche, was what made life beautiful and, ironically, enjoyable. In a form of […]
Posted on January 13, 2021 Leave a Comment
Imagine the following situation, Your girlfriend has just left you. Bewildered and listless, you sit down at the table outside where you shared so many happy memories together. You think of how she used to throw her head back and laugh when you made a particularly witty remark. You remember how she would meticulously roll […]
Posted on January 10, 2021 Leave a Comment
One thing we are very good at is ‘putting things off’. It has been a while, but we will call our parents tomorrow; we are just too tired to do it today. We will start that diet regime, but after just one more hamburger. We will become more understanding and empathetic, but later, because what […]
Posted on January 6, 2021 Leave a Comment
With tender and invisible threads, we are inextricably bound to one another. Although we choose to live mainly through shadowy abstractions of the ‘I’ and ‘me’, they only momentarily disguise the indisputable truth: we cannot live without each other. Of course, there are those who try. They retreat into the mountains, or run away on […]
Posted on January 5, 2021 Leave a Comment
We often think of charity in the material sense, such as giving money. But this is only its most narrow interpretation. Considered more widely, to be charitable is to offer someone something they may not be able to get themselves, or may not entirely deserve, but because they are human, are worthy of it. There […]
Posted on January 3, 2021 Leave a Comment
When it comes to our relationships with ourselves, one of our most hazardous and insidious beliefs is that we must always be happy. A product of a culture that extols us at every waking moment to enjoy and sap as much pleasure from life as possible, we are reminded everywhere that happiness is the supreme […]
Posted on January 2, 2021 Leave a Comment
Our society has a tendency to embrace simplistic narratives about the world and our place in it. ‘Good versus evil’ would be one such example. Whether it is a hero battling a villain, or a ‘nation under God’ battling terrorism, there is no such thing as a person (or nation) that is inherently good, and […]
Proper Candor 