ALL EPISODES

Pain isn't really our enemy. We think it is, but it's not. It's a process that too often we try to run away from when we should be embracing it. As humans, we know how to feel pain like no one else. Not only do we feel physical pain, but we're experts in carrying pain over from our experiences. Our intelligence relative to other species on earth is not just a blessing.

It is hard to know what to do when you're with someone going through a really  hard time, at least for me. Maybe they're crying. Other times they might be yelling, and on occasion they may be hysterical. What's sad is that I think there have been a lot of opportunities I missed to take some of that pain from someone else.

If you really want to love a thing, sometimes you need to learn to hate it.  First, real love is when you can still appreciate something even after the shine has worn off. Imagine you're dating in person. Generally, you wouldn't decide to marry them after a day or two of fun, not because that person is a bad fit, but because you have no clue who that person is yet you haven't seen any of their flaws. The reason we try to date for a while is because no one can legitimately

It seems like there's some amount of value we assign to having the quality of being ambitious, at least in the United States. People advertise that they are ambitious on resumes and profiles and public forums, so apparently being ambitious is a good thing, but why? People say they wanna be successful because they are ambitious, but what does that even mean?

I've hated people deeply. And if you're being honest, so have you, anyone who says they've never hated someone is lying to themselves, but is our nature truly so constraining that there's nothing for us to do about that? The more I think on my enemies, the harder it becomes to hate them, even if I still am at odds with them. I have found in my life that everyone I have ever spoken to thinks they're in the right. They'll gimme detailed arguments for why someone else was ter

I think the vast majority of humanity's pursuits boiled down to an effort to escape pain, but pain built civilization.  We learned to use fire to keep the pain of the cold at bay. We drive cars and use computers to speed everything up so we can avoid the pain of having to wait so long. If pain is such a bad thing, then why is it so often the catalyst for so many good things in my pursuit of understanding?

Once upon a time, I used to think that there was a way to make everyone like me, but that's not possible. I don't think even Mother Teresa was universally loved. No one is universally loved. Some people are able to manage being liked by a lot of people, but those people are also very frequently uninteresting.

Freedom seems like the ability for us to do whatever we want. But that's often the very thing that enslaves us at this moment. I kind of want to check my phone, but is that freedom or compulsion? What most of us like to call freedom is more of a curated form of voluntary enslavement. So, I noticed something a while back.

I had a friend. Literally have his world come crashing down on him this morning when a water pipe burst in his apartment building and started leaking from the ceiling. Understandably, his girlfriend was in a panic and to some degree, so was he. They had just gotten settled into this place with jobs and responsibilities weighing on them. They just didn't have the energy or the time to deal with this on top of everything else they already had going on. I read something in a