Avoiding burnout is difficult to write about, because the basic premise is obnoxious. Burnout is a rich man’s game.
perspective
Get out of the conceptual rut that a good life looks one way and a disappointing one looks another.
It seems to me that the ears that are listening make more difference than the way the music sounds.
Will Oldham aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy. This notion applies outside of music, too. Also? He put on one of my favorite concerts of all time a few years ago here in Atlanta. Brilliant dude. Excited to read this new book. (via Austin Kleon)
Perception vs. Reality. An excerpt from The Start-up of You.
When you’re in denial about how invested you are in a single outcome, that’s when unrealistic expectations creep in.
When we get better at expressiveness, we get better at understanding, better at sympathy, better at bullshit-detection, better at experiencing pleasure, better at true engagement (with others, with the world, with ourselves).
George Saunders. Which reminds me of one of my oft-quoted favorite Phrases to Live By: “If you write like porridge you will think like it, and the other way around.”
I bet we all in this room live about the same. We eat about the same and sleep about the same. We pretty much drive a car for 10 years. All this stuff doesn’t make it any different. I will watch the Super Bowl on a big screen television just like you. We are living the same life. I have two luxuries: I get to do what I want to do every day and I get to travel a lot faster than you.
Escalation « Cheap Talk
“You are invited to extrapolate this idea to all kinds of social interaction where you are being perfectly polite, reasonable, and accomodating, but he is being insensitive, abrasive, and stubborn.” (via)
After us they’ll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they’ll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, “Oh! Life is so hard!” and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.
Table for One
Photos of people eating solo. Interesting that when you post things without explanation, the reactions can be unpredictable.
The Wrong Stuff : Those Three Little Words (“Honey, You’re Right”): Harville Hendrix on Being Wrong
Anger is an attempt to coerce a person into surrendering their reality, so that there’s only one reality in the relationship instead of two. And when the anger triggered by the anxiety doesn’t work, people experience depression. Depression is the experience of the loss of power: “I can’t make my world happen.”
Once they go into depression, couples—if they stay together—will then enter a bargaining stage. The bargaining goes like this: “Well, OK, I’m different and you’re different, so let’s make a deal about whose reality is going to be in the forefront.”
The Wrong Stuff : Those Three Little Words (“Honey, You’re Right”): Harville Hendrix on Being Wrong
It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. FUTURE AGES SHALL TALK OF THIS; THIS SHALL BE FAMOUS TO ALL POSTERITY. Whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.
An exercise in empathy « Snarkmarket
An interesting mental experiment. “The core of the exercise, I think, is that you see yourself as just another person in the space—an opaque bag of bones—instead of as, you know, the movie camera. The privileged POV.”
Ah, privilege
It’s 23 degrees outside, and I catch myself silently complaining that the shower is too hot. One 2008 goal among many: complain less. There are bigger problems on this planet.
