Gatherings crackle and flourish when real thought goes into them, when (often invisible) structure is baked into them, and when a host has the curiosity, willingness, and generosity of spirit to try.

It’s a story about the toxic brew of confirmation bias, fuzzy math, and hubris. It’s a story about what people will do when they are allowed to spend other people’s money with minimal oversight.

The magic is not in the analyzing or the understanding. The magic lives in the wonder of what we do not know.

Whether wicked or well-intentioned, language is a way to get members of a community on the same ideological page. To help them feel like they belong to something big

We must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how.

As we have said from the beginning, we think people are built to maximize their own pleasure and minimize their own pain. In reality, we are actually built to overcome our own pleasure and increase our own pain in the service of following society’s norms.

‘The paradox,’ he says, ‘is that, though every organization thinks they have unique problems, many change issues are centred on one thing. The ability – or inability – to convert vision into action.’

“The late Native historian Jack Forbes always stressed that while living persons are not responsible for what their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in.”

Because here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter how much gas we give good new habits; if we don’t resolve our bad ones, we still have our foot on the brake.

Privilege accumulates as you advance in life.

At some point in recent history, the global economy stopped making sense.

“Don’t underestimate the psychological value of that feeling of direct connection with the author as a compensation for what might seem like worldly sacrifice required by heresy.”

Nothing comes from nothing. No brain is an island.

Integrity is meaningless when your highest good lies in your immediate advantage of the moment. Integrity can’t be sustained in a person who privileges their feelings over factual reality.

Scientists are finding that certain discomforts protect us from physical and psychological problems like obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, and even more fundamental issues like feeling a lack of meaning and purpose.

Anxiety works by anticipating and inhibiting. It says: Don’t do that, you’ll get hurt. Don’t do that, you’ll be disappointed. Don’t do that, you’ll embarrass yourself. Anxiety likes routine. It likes predictability. It likes knowing outcomes.

There is no one predator from which to escape; there are many. We are in the business of running now. It is all so urgent. Every year, it seems we must run harder. There is no other solution. We can only run, and panic, and chatter out our fears to others, who will mirror them back to us.

Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.

Perhaps my biggest takeaway was that modern medicine does not really have a handle on when and how to treat the chronic diseases of aging that will likely kill most of us.

The cult of the self prioritizes the needs of the individual while disregarding the needs of others.