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  • Book Note: The Three Marriages by David Whyte

    What we desire in the three marriages is a sense of profound physical participation with creation, the reconfirmation that we are not alone in the world and the reminder that there is a larger context to existence than the one we have established ourselves.

    The central idea of the book is that work (broadly defined), relationships, and self are all important parts of life that we should manage well. Some people dedicate themselves completely to work and neglect their relationships and themselves, while others give up everything in pursuit of enlightenment. These people might seem heroic, but I prefer David Whyte’s view. Some passages are difficult to follow, but the conclusions at the end of each chapter help.

    This sense of belonging and not belong is lived out by most people through three principal dynamics: first, through relationship to other people and other living things (particularly and very personally, to one other living, breathing person in relationship or marriage); second, through work; and third, through an understanding of what it means to be themselves, discrete individuals alive and seemingly separate from everyone and everything else.

    …

    To neglect any one of the three marriages is to impoverish them all, because they are not actually separate commitments but different expressions of the way each individual belongs to the world.

    …

    Work is a constant conversation. It is the back-and-forth between what I think is me and what I think is not me; it is the edge between what the world needs of me and what I need of the world. Like the person to whom I am committed in a relationship, it is constantly changing and surprising me by its demands and needs but also by where it leads me, how much it teaches me, and especially, by how much tact, patience and maturity it demands of me.

    …

    Happiness in the second marriage of work, like happiness in the first marriage with a person, is possible only through seeing it in a greater context than surviving the everyday. We must have a relationship with our work that is larger than any individual job description we are given. A real work, like a real person, grows and changes and surprises us, asking us constantly for recommitment. In work, we have often made secret vows; sometimes we do not know ourselves what those vows are until we look back with some perspective on the actual nature of the work we have accomplished.

    …

    Neglecting this internal marriage, we can easily make ourselves a hostage to the externals of work and the demands of relationship. We find ourselves unable to move in these outer marriages because we have no inner foundation from which to step out with a firm persuasion. It is as if, absent a loving relationship with this inner representation of our self, we fling ourselves in all directions in our outer lives, looking for love in all the wrong places.

    …

    Happiness is somebody to love, Something to do, And something to hope for. CHINESE PROVERB

    There seems to be a constant visiting dynamic in all stages of life where it appears that we get only the girl, the guy, the work, the job, the sense of self, or a participation in wider creation that we actually feel we are worthy of. If we don’t feel we deserve it, then, like a spendthrift heiress, throwing her patrimony to the winds, we do our best to sabotage and give away what we feel we did not deserve in the first place.

    …

    Confidence and self-belief are contagious; they are not a matter of pure arrogance or overweening egotism, they are the sense of being part of a greater story others have not yet discovered and giving off an almost physical sense of invitation to join that story, that disarms an then changes potential enemies into allies.

    …

    …life can find you only if you are paying real attention to something other than your own concerns, if you can hear and see the essence of otherness in the world, if you can treat the world as if it is not just a backdrop to your own journey, if you can have a relationship with the world that isn’t based on triumphing over it or complaining about it.

    …

    To glimpse our vocation, we must learn how to be sought out and found by a work as much as we strive to identify it ourselves. We must make ourselves findable by being seen; to do that we must hazard ourselves and make ourselves available to the world we want to enter. Finding and being found is like a mutual falling in love. To have a possibility of happiness we must at the beginning fall in love at least a little with our work. We can choose a work on a mere strategic, financial basis, but then we should not expect profound future happiness as a result.

    …

    A real work, like a real love, takes not only passion but a certain daily, obsessive, tenacious, illogical form of insanity to keep it alive. Once you have experienced the real essence at the beginning of the affair with a work, the company, the initial image with which we fell in love, alive. We want to be surprised again and again by where our work takes us and wha kind of person we are becoming as we follow it. Like a love, or a sense of our selves, we can nibble and negotiate at the edges but the central core of the relationship is actually nonnegotiable.

    …

    The innocence of youth is necessary again and again through the threshold of a life no matter our chronological age. Therefore, at any time of life, follow your own questions; don’t mistake other people’s questions for your own. Fall in love with your own questions so that you can commensurately be disappointed by them at a later date. See innocence not as something to be replaced by experience but as a necessary way, no matter your actual age, of paying attention, without which you cannot begin a new cycle of investigation. Fall in love with the possibilities ahead. At least to begin with, be infatuated with an imagined perfection.

    …

    It may in fact be, that the very essence of what individuals have to offer the world is through a close understanding of their weaknesses and blind spots–blind spots in themselves or in others. The very dynamic we confront when we feel it is impossible is the very dynamic we will put into the work, a dynamic that will make it distinctive and entirely our own.

    …

    The pursuit of the self is the pursuit of that part of us not defined by our worries and anxieties.

    …

    But this pursuit begins only by admitting that human anxiety is endless and to be expected.

    …

    The pursuit of the self is also the pursuit of us that is untouched by our successes and accomplishments.

    …

    …the marriage with the self is the pursuit of a way of being that is so alive to all the phenomena of existence that it stops distinguishing so much between what is winning and what is losing.

    …

    What we see as risk and foolhardiness on the outside can seem more like a constant cohesive drive on the inside that holds to priorities that cannot be discerned by others because they reside in a far too private chamber of personal experience to be shared easily. To dare everything is not necessarily to travel off, but often the opposite, to have faith in a foundation you have discovered in life and which, though it is difficult to describe, even to yourself, you refuse to relinquish.

    …

    It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.

    …

    Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.

    …

    In a very personal way we are marrying not only a person’s ability to love and take care of us, but also that person’s particular species of selfishness and particular form of egotism. It is only a question of time before these appear. One of the tests of finding the right person is to ask ourselves if this is the particular form of selfishness and egotism we can live with. Considering the difficulties of marriages we might pose the question on a grander scale and ask if this is the particular form of insanity we can live with. A sign of possible success is our ability to answer in the affirmative. It measures the chemistry is right, and also that we are looking not for perfection in our partner but for a mutual exploration of imperfections.

    …

    The memory of that man has stayed with me year after year, reminding me that I could work wherever there was a corner, wherever there was a knee or a pen or a pad, wherever there was a pause in the besieging glamor of the world. I didn’t need a paradise in order to work, but work itself, given focus and given time for that focus to blossom, could open a little Eden of its own.

    …

    In many ways the settled intensity of a good work is very similar. From the outside very little seems to be happening, but in good work we return every day to the desk or the workbench to push it along a little further.

    …

    Each time we return to the work, that frontier is a little further out and a little nearer to accomplishing what we first set out to achieve. Like being in the midst of a growing family, we can sense the steadily growing satisfaction of a work slowly beginning to form; the coaxing of that work through all the setbacks and the dead ends, the final ability to bring it to a conclusion, and the sense of satisfaction we feel in finally sending out in the world for others to examine and use, is one of the great privileges of having found a vocation to which we want to give ourselves wholeheartedly.

    …

    We know we have the right vocation and a are happily married to a work when we get a song in our hearts simply from doing the work itself, as much as from its rewards and its fruits.

    …

    Becoming visible to the world through our work seems to be a central necessity in a vocation. The more invisible we feel, the more unheard, unseen, unheeded, the more dissatisfied we seem to be and the more unreal we seem to ourselves. This attempt at visibility involves not just our effect on the present but also our effect on those yet to follow us. In the marriage with work, our legacy is our favored child, one we have made ourselves from our own body, one that for many years kept us awake at nights, a legacy through which we want to pass on our best hopes and dreams, something with a life of its own and something perhaps, just beginning to create its own future.

    …

    Being enlightened does not mean we assume supernatural powers or find a perfection that exalts us above the daily losses other human beings are subject to; enlightenment means we have accepted thoroughly our transience, our vulnerability and our imperfections and live just as robustly with them as without them.

    …

    Each of the three marriages is nonnegotiable. They cannot be “balanced” against one another–a little taken from this and little given to that–except at their very peripheries.

    …

    To “love” another in the first marriage, we must love the desires that the other person holds for the other two marriages.

    …

    The conversation between the marriages–the marriage of marriages–can be as difficult otherwise hold together as any of the individual marriages, and like each of the individual marriages this marriage of marriages is best entered, like any other conversation, through the doorway of vulnerability.

    …

    Doing something innocent, dangerous and wonderful all at the same time may be the perfect metaphor for understanding one of the demands made by a marriage of marriages; the need to live in multiple contexts, multiple layers and with multiple people all at the same time without choosing between them.

    …

    Thinking of work, self and other as three marriages offers the possibility of living them out in a way in which they are not put into competition with one another, where each of the marriages can protect, embolden and enliven the others and help keep us mutually honest, relevant, authentic and alive.

  • Choosing What Deserves Our Attention 

    Maria Konnikova advocates deep reading and intentional use of attention. Although I’m a fan of books, I don’t think the medium matters as much as knowing what we want and being able to focus our attention on it.

    Excerpts:

    What do we lose when we stop reading deeply…We lose critical thinking ability. We lose our memory. We lose analytical skills. We lose metacognitive awareness. We lose creative thought. When we lose deep reading, we lose deep thinking.

    …

    When things are easy, we often come away with the false impression of learning, knowledge, and comprehension. We think we know something when we actually don’t. The process of struggling with material, of grappling with new ideas, of trying things that are difficult, both mentally and physically, is how we learn to do the thing, how we grow, how we go from thinking we know to actually knowing.

    …

    One of the most often quoted lines of poetry comes from Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.” She writes, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” It’s an exhortation to think (deeply!) about the choices you make on a day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute basis, because those choices, in the end, are what make up your life. And the time you’ve spent on them is time you’ll never get back.

    …

    Your attentional choices determine who you are. And if you constantly choose to not pay attention, to go for quickness at ease, where exactly does that leave you?

    …

    Let me end with lines from another favorite poet, Wendell Berry, from his poem “How to Be a Poet (to remind myself):

    Make a place to sit down. 
    Sit down. Be quiet. 
    You must depend upon 
    affection, reading, knowledge, 
    skill

    …

    Communicate slowly. Live 
    a three-dimensioned life; 
    stay away from screens. 
    Stay away from anything 
    that obscures the place it is in.

    …

    Live your life fully. Learn to read books, once more—and to enjoy the journey.

  • Ink Drawing: Vagabond IV

  • Five Days in Xiamen with My Son

    While my older son was preparing for his school exams, I took my younger son to Xiamen for five days. We stayed with relatives and had daily private badminton lessons, which were much cheaper than in Singapore. We also played basketball and shopped at local sports stores. We spent our days much as locals might spend a holiday. We didn’t do much sightseeing (I did that in the past), but we still got to see a different part of the world.

    The area where we stayed is officially classified as a village. Its streets were chaotic, with migrant workers, bicycles, motorcycles, and cars sharing the roads with few clear pedestrian walkways. Prices were low: 2–3 yuan for breakfast (about USD0.40), 12 yuan for a simple lunch buffet, and 2 yuan for a quick haircut. People hustle, but they also make time for leisure. The badminton courts were full from 9 a.m. to noon every day. I suspect many of the players worked in the afternoon. The courts closed from noon to 3 p.m. while the owners and staff took a break.

    A typical breakfast store

    My son enjoyed the trip as much as our earlier one to Hong Kong. For him, enough sports and activities, decent food, and a place to sleep are all he needs. We often associate a good vacation with exotic or beautiful places, perhaps because they look better on social media. This trip reminded me that a place need not be scenic or touristy to be interesting. With the right mindset, even staying somewhere few tourists would visit can offer new insights and, as my son found, be just as fun and fulfilling.

    P.S. Martin Sandbu reminds us that travel can expand our horizons. I think learning more about a place before visiting can enrich the experience and help us put what we see into perspective.

    Excerpts:

    One of the great, under-appreciated benefits of modernity, enlightenment, and eventually mass consumerism has been to make it possible, at scale, to travel with the primary motive of curiosity and self-improvement. 

    …

    The shock of the new — the chance to see how others live, to adopt another perspective on one’s own customs — is no longer something that is either painfully inflicted on us through war or exile, or reserved for a lucky few. Billions of people have the time and the money to take to the road freely, without risk of danger or ruin, through the simple means of a holiday to an unknown destination.

    …

    Mundane experiences can be existential for those who live them. Many are those whose lives have been transformed simply by seeing with their own eyes that another life is possible than the one they knew at home.

    This humanist potential can be undermined if the travel is compromised — whether because of social media’s pressure to document one’s presence rather than be present in the moment; or the temptation to replicate elsewhere the comforts of home, reducing travel to mere physical displacement.

    Done right, however, travel for discovery’s sake unsettles our received wisdom. It increases our knowledge of the astounding diversity of human ways of life, and it makes it a bit harder to take for granted the way that happens to be our own. Every time that happens, it strengthens a little the bulwark we sorely need against forces intent on shrinking our horizons.    

    And Paul Theroux on travel:

    That approach became the basis of his travelling: going alone, leaving the beaten track, courting danger and prioritising people over sights.

    Theroux mocks today’s vogue for travel as performance. “Here’s my Instagram page. Here’ me eating a meal. Here’s me with a Maasai warrior.” If you are a tourist, you’re not bring anything back of value unless you embed yourself in culture and find something that you can’t find on the internet. And what would it be? It would be someone’s story.”

    He says modern travellers often isolate themselves from the paces they visit. If you’re getting WhatsApps from home, “you’re never wholly in a place.” Staying in luxury hotels is isolating, too: “When you are among wealthy people, you will see nothing. No one’s gonna talk to you. And if you’re very comfortable, you’re not going to anything.”

  • Richard Estes and Looking

    I also like looking at the blue sky outside the airplane window, and I hope to keep learning to see the world more deeply.

    Excerpt:

    “I went to the Art Institute of Chicago,” Estes, 94, tells me over the phone from his Maine home when I ask how he became an artist. “It was pretty traditional: figure drawing in the morning, figure painting in the afternoon . . . One of my teachers told me something I never forgot. ‘Don’t ever expect to make any money.’”

    …

    “I spent 15 years as an illustrator in advertising,” he tells me. “I always wanted to be an artist but I had no idea how it would happen.” 

    …

    Estes is unwilling to ascribe almost any intentions to his work beyond the representation. “I wasn’t thinking about anything profound, just looking at the world.”

    …

    But maybe that is the thing. The intense precision with which he works demands a certain kind of gaze: a close examination of surface and city, of light, colour and the intricacies of details we would not normally notice. Those phone booths and candy store windows, cafeterias and subway cars were the backgrounds of everyday life, mostly unseen and unexamined. And now mostly disappeared. What felt then like a finding of the extraordinary in the ordinary, now feels like documentation; nostalgia for a layer of urban life that has been flattened by banal corporate overlay.

    …

    “There is something about looking,” he says. “When I get on planes, I’m always amazed that the first thing people do is close the blinds. The cloud formations moving beneath you are fantastic.”

    P.S. Here’s Ron Lemen on learning to see: Slow down, be curious, and pay attention.

  • Documentary: RAFA & Novak Djokovic

    RAFA: The documentary portrays Nadal’s achievements and struggles well. I respect his willingness to suffer and sacrifice his health to test his limits, as well as the routines he developed to manage pressure. Still, like this reviewer, I would have liked more insight into his thoughts and motivations.

    Novak Djokovic: The Wolf In Winter: Djokobic’s open and direct, and the documentary brings out his personality well. Like Michael Jordan, he uses anger and perceived disrespect as fuel and doesn’t mind being seen as a jester or villain. My personality is closer to Nadal’s, and I don’t think I could perform well under the kind of pressure Djokovic has faced. Although we are very different, I like how he structures his life around tennis to stay at the top. Here’s an FT review of the documentary.

    There are common threads among top performers, but also many ways to reach the top. What works for one person might not work for another. We all need to find our own path. The NYT also has an article comparing Roger Federer and Pete Sampras.

    Every player does it in a different way. They just need to know who they are.

    …

    To me, tennis is a good metaphor for life. You have to find solutions. It’s about finding positives, creating optimism, being true to the process that allows you to execute under pressure. It’s the same mental reinforcement that gives you the drive and belief that, no matter what’s going on, you’re going to find a way to create that opportunity to shine.

    …

    Pete put more pressure on himself than anybody ever has, but he actually relished it to prove a point. Roger did everything out of joy and love.

    P.S. Inat: A culturally specific Balkan and Slavic concept—most famously used in Serbian—that means defiant stubbornness driven by pride, spite, and resilience.

  • The Barber’s Razor and Small Pleasures

    During my primary school years in Hong Kong, my dad used to take me to an old back-alley barber in Mong Kok. The place was run-down and uncomfortable, and the barber uncles were not exactly the gentle type. I remember reading the free Lo Fu Gee (Old Master Q) comics while waiting for my turn.

    Got this from a recent book sale

    At the time, my parents liked me to have a botak-style haircut, so the uncle basically just had to shave my head. I didn’t like the electric clippers, but they also used a razor blade around the sides, and strangely, I liked the sensation. I remember one uncle warning me, “This is a knife, so don’t move or it might cut your skin.” Meanwhile, I was hoping he would take his time, as I was enjoying it.

    Like a typical child, once I became a teenager and had the freedom to choose my own hairstyle, I never went back to such short hair.

    My primary school hairstyle
    Teenage hairstyle

    Time passed. I’m less averse to short hair now, and I’ve found a place that also uses a razor blade. As a bonus, the haircut comes with a little head and shoulder massage. I get my hair cut once every month or two. It has become another one of those small pleasures in life that I treasure.

    P.S. This is probably the kind of “small stuff” Ian Bogost refers to in his book. Here’s a podcast.

  • Efficiency Versus What Matters


    Staircase in Capri’ (1878) by John Singer Sargent from the FT article

    Nichol Chan argues that our desire for efficiency and optimization can crowd out what matters to us.

    For things I value, such as relationships or a craft, focusing on quality and being present often helps. Reflecting on my experiences and shaping them into a narrative also helps me slow down. Perhaps the distinction is to optimize what is instrumental while being present with what is intrinsically valuable. For more instrumental things, I’m happy to optimize with simple routines I can follow most of the time, while leaving room for exploration and serendipity. And periodically reminding myself that all things are transient makes optimization seem less important than treasuring them while they last.

    P.S. Being more playful and playing games just for fun also helps.

    Excepts:

    It’s no longer about whether something feels meaningful or enjoyable. We start looking for the fastest way to learn, the smartest routine to follow and the most productive way to unwind. At some point, even rest becomes another thing to improve. 

    …

    As a self-confessed Type A personality, I rarely leave an interest alone for long. If I pick up a new hobby, I find myself asking whether it could become content or a side hustle.

    …

    The danger isn’t that my generation no longer values friendship, creativity or simply being present. It’s that optimisation quietly changes what earns our attention.

    …

    If optimisation is the mindset, technology has become its greatest enabler.

    …

    In theory, all of this should create more space for the relationships, hobbies and slower experiences we claim to value. Instead, it creates new expectations to do even more. Long before ChatGPT, sociologist Richard Sennett warned that societies obsessed with speed and flexibility slowly erode the qualities that take the longest to build: patience, craftsmanship, commitment and even a stable sense of self.

    …

    And that’s the paradox. We built these tools to give ourselves more time for what matters, yet they often make it harder to choose exactly those things. The challenge was never that we lacked time. It was that we’ve come to believe every spare moment should be put to work.

    …

    That’s the contradiction at the heart of the age of maxxing – we say we still value creativity, deep friendships, craftsmanship and community. We just keep building lives that make those things harder to practise.

    P.S. Enuma Okoro on not needing to be productive on holidays: “It makes me think of how rarely we take time or have the opportunity to pause and really think about the kind of holiday (or even just day off) we need or desire.”

    P.P.S Japan’s ongaku kissa (music cafes) provide a space for people to be present and just listen to music.

  • Book Note: You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy

    When you reflect on what someone said, the person’s thoughts and feelings take up residence in you. It’s an extension of the idea of listening as a form of hospitality. You are inviting someone into your consciousness. and the conversations you care about are the ones you carry with you in memory.

    To me, communication is key to a good relationship. I don’t mind disagreement, but avoiding difficult conversations bothers me because it leaves little chance to resolve problems, reconcile differences, or repair mistakes.

    I understand that talking to strangers can make even introverts happier, and that anyone can be interesting and teach us something. Yet I’m often impatient with certain behaviors, and my natural tendency is not to engage with strangers. Reconciling these instincts becomes harder as we get older, become more set in our preferences, and settle into our routines. At minimum, I want to become a better listener to the people I care about.

    Excerpts:

    The ability to listen to anyone has been replaced by the capacity to shut out everyone, particularly those who disagree with us or don’t get to the point fast enough.

    …

    The executive director of a performing arts organization in Los Angeles told me, “If I really listened to the people in my life, I’d have to face the fact that I detest most of them.”

    …

    Others said they were too busy to listen or just couldn’t be bothered.

    …

    Listening takes effort. Like reading, you might choose to go over some things carefully while skimming others, depending on the situation. But the ability to listen carefully, like the ability to read carefully, degrades if you don’t do it often enough.

    …

    Among the most frequently cited bad listening behaviors are:

    • Interrputing
    • Responding vaguely or illogically to what was just said
    • Looking at a phone, watch, around room, or otherwise away from the speaker
    • Fidgeting (tapping on the table, frequently shifting position, clicking a pen, etc.)

    Hearing is passive. Listening is active. The best listeners focus their attention and recruit other senses to the effort. Their brains work hard to process all that incoming information and find meaning, which opens the door to creativity, empathy, insight, and knowledge. Understanding is the goal of listening, and it takes effort.

    …

    Our brains not only sync up the moment someone tells us something, the resulting understanding and connection influences how we process subsequent information. The more you listen to someone, such as a close friend or a family member, and the more that person listens to you, the more likely you two will be of like minds.

    …

    To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know.

    …

    It’s what we all crave; to be understood as a person with thoughts, emotions, and intentions that are unique and valuable and deserving of attention.

    …

    Listening is about the experience of being experienced. It’s when someone takes an interest in who you are and what you are doing.

    …

    The most valuable lesson I’ve learned as a journalist is that everybody is interesting if you ask the right questions. If someone is dull or uninteresting, it’s on you.

    …

    …people in long-term relationships tend to lose their curiosity for each other. Not necessarily in an unkind way; they just become convinced they know each other better than they do. They don’t listen because they think they already know what the other person will say.

    …

    Put another way, having listened well and often to someone in the past makes it easier to get back on the same wavelength when you get out of sync, perhaps due to physical separation or following a time of emotional distance caused by an argument.

    …

    The world is easier to navigate if you remember that people are governed by emotions, acting more often out of jealousy, pride, shame, desire, fear, or vanity than dispassionate logic.

    …

    J. Pierpont Morgan said, “A man always has two reasons for what he does–a good one, and the real one.” Listening helps you understand people’s mind-sets and motivations, which is essential in building cooperative and productive relationships as well as knowing which relationships you’re better off avoiding.

    …

    When you leave a conversation, ask yourself, What did I just learn about that person? What was most concerning to that person today? How did that person feel about what we were talking about? If you can’t answer those questions, you probably need to work on your listening. “If you go into every situation thinking you already know everything, it limits your ability to grow, learn, connect, and evolve,” Noesner said. “I think a good listener is someone who is open to hearing someone else’s experiences and ideas and acknowledges their point of view.”

    …

    According to Nichols, to be a good listener means using your available bandwidth not to take mental side trips but rather to double down on your efforts to understand and intuit what someone is saying. He said listening well is a matter of continually asking yourself if people’s messages are valid and what their motivations are for telling you whatever they are telling you.

    …

    To listen does not mean, or even imply, that you agree with someone. It simply means you accept the legitimacy of the other person’s point of view and that you might have something to learn from it.

    …

    According to Derber, shift responses are symptomatic of conversational narcissism, which quashes any chance of connection. Shift response are usually self-referential statements while support responses are more often other-directed questions. But they have to be truly curious questions meant to elicit more information and not subtly impose your own opinion…

    The authors advise squelching the impulses to:

    • suggest you know how someone feels
    • identify the cause of the problem
    • tell someone what to do about the problem
    • minimise their concerns
    • bring perspective to a situation with forced positivity and platitudes
    • admire the person’s strength

    Being aware of someone’s troubles does not mean you need to fix them. People usually aren’t looking for solutions from you anyway; they just want a sounding board.

    …

    Kids, like all of us, just want to be heard. Try instead, “Have you always felt this way?” or “What would quitting mean?” Look at it as an invitation to have a conversation, not as something to be fixed or get upset about.

    …

    Regret is the second-most common emotional state, after love, she said, and the two feelings are intertwined since the most intense regret comes from neglecting those we love. Relationships most often fail due to neglect, and one of the principle kinds of neglect is not being attentive.

    …

    I, myself, am an inveterate quote collector–I jot down any interesting, funny, or thought-provoking thing I hear, or overhear, during the course of the day. I have several notebooks as well as files on my computer filled with pithy and profound quotes from friends, family, colleagues, strangers, and of course, people I have interviewed. When you start paying attention, you’d be surprised how many things you will find worth recording. And reading back over your quote collection, you start to pick up interesting themes that are as revealing about yourself as the people you are quoting.

    …

    Alexander Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University and author of the treatise On Friendship, once told me, “The best friendships are those where you are able to immediately pick up the conversation where you left off because the person’s words have remained with you.” Indeed, one of the most gratifying things you can say to another person is: “I’ve been thinking about what you said.” Likewise, friends are people who can connect what you are saying in the moment to things you’ve said in the past to help you work through problems or clarify your thinking or, in some cases, just make you laugh at the association.

    …

    Technology does not so much interfere with listening as make it seem unnecessary. Our devices indulge our fear of intimacy by fooling us into thinking that we are socially connected even when we are achingly alone. We avoid the messiness and imperfections of others, retreating into the relative safety of our devices, swiping and deleting with abandon. The result is a loss of richness and nuance in our social interactions, and we suffer from a creeping sense of dissatisfaction.

    …

    Listening takes effort. Understanding and intimacy must be earned.

  • Think Less About Self

    Thinking less about oneself is good not only for performance but also happiness.

    Auren Hoffman thinks most of us are introspecting too much:

    Excerpts:

    people with high amounts of introspection almost ALWAYS tend to be unhappy. they become unproductive and lose their sense of meaning.

    …

    Nolen-Hoeksema spent two decades showing that “rumination”, the (introspective) habit of cycling through your own feelings and problems, predicts onset, duration, severity, and relapse rate of depression. the more you process, the worse you actually get…

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    the goal of introspection is to understand your strengths and weaknesses and to understand what you actually want in life. 

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    a small minority of the population is doing real introspection. most of them are super quiet about it. they do the work, get their answer, and go back to building or whatever productive thing they can do in their life.

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    a much larger group is doing rumination and calling it introspection. those people are less happy. the wellness industry keeps prescribing them more of what is making them unhappy.

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    the best way to be consistently happy is to get out of your own head. stop thinking about yourself. that means stop thinking about your feelings.

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    watch the happiest people you know. they are not the ones with the most resolved inner lives. they are the ones who think about themselves the least. they’re usually absorbed in a project, a craft, a problem, a family. their attention points outward and stays there.