This post contains loads of articles categorised under Psychology and Philosophy. These are handpicked articles over the course of years for CAT Aspirants. This is the last of 2 posts. Click on the following link to go to the previous post: LINK here.
Every Article will have blurb, either written by me or an extract from the original post (mostly the latter) followed by the link to reach the article.
Article 124
The Value of Being Wrong
Article 123
A journey in releasing expectations
Article 122
Parasitic Whiteness on and off the couch
Article 121
The framework of life for anxious beings
Article 120
When Your Job Fills In for Your Faith, That’s a Problem
Article 119
When it comes to lasting romance, passion has nothing on friendship.
Article 118
“What Know-It-Alls Don’t Know, Or The Illusion of Competence”
Article 117
“The First Authoritarian. Popper’s Plato”
Article 116
“primordial love
Some scents never change”
Article 115
“Wait, that pen is doing WHAT?”
Article 114
“Ultimately, few have the training and understanding to know what counts as a serious examination of evidence under conditions of patchy knowledge. The rest of us engage in confirmation bias, seeking out what we regard as the most credible voices that have defended what we are already disposed to believe.”
Article 113
“Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can”
Article 112
“Doctors are of course trained to view every problem through the lens of disease. But what happens when artists do the same?”
https://bit.ly/3HBd6gs
Article 111
“For the first time in my life, the crushing anxiety of trauma overtook me, my body on such constant high alert that I literally didn’t sleep for weeks and later had to be briefly hospitalized myself, the staff shoving adult coloring books in front of me as my milk leaked onto everything, teenage depressives staring with wide eyes at the growing saucer stains on my shirt.”
https://bit.ly/3JunTL0
Article 110
“Imagination isn’t just a spillover from our problem-solving prowess. It might be the core of what human brains evolved to do.”
https://bit.ly/3BZPu1P
Article 109
“If humans were to disappear from the face of the Earth, what might dogs become? And would they be better off without us?”
https://bit.ly/2ZFhYR5
Article 108
“War and Peace through a different lens”
https://bit.ly/3CkKsxT
Article 107
“Our beliefs and emotions seem so personal to us, but they’re connected to what people around us do. Our minds change, sometimes without our understanding why. We can suddenly start to question something we once took for granted. It might be something trivial, like whether or not women over 30 should wear leggings, or something more profound, like whether anyone has the right to voice an opinion about what women over 30 should wear.”
https://bit.ly/3j7Td6V
Article 106
“For 50 years, Enthusiastic Sobriety programs have promised to help teenagers kick drug and alcohol addiction. But former followers say ES doesn’t save lives – it destroys them.”
https://bit.ly/3lVxmA5
Article 105
“Help is a funny word. My first interactions with it were almost always ones of violence. A character in a movie cried for help. Someone was hurt, always. They needed help. They needed help now. The way they needed help was obvious. They were trapped under metal. They were physically crushed. A bone was broken. Blood was on their clothes. If help didn’t arrive soon, then the help would arrive too late. And then there were tears. And there was no helping those.”
https://bit.ly/3kCa8Qg
Article 104
“Empathy is, at heart, an aesthetic appreciation of the other”
https://bit.ly/3kBPeQ0
Article 103
“The Opposite of Toxic Positivity
“Tragic optimism” is the search for meaning during the inevitable tragedies of human existence, and is better for us than avoiding darkness and trying to “stay positive.””
http://bit.ly/3kCAsID
Article 102
“NIETZSCHE: The Übermensch (Overman)”
http://bit.ly/387jNHt
Article 101
“Other People’s Despair | Mending the Social Fabric Won’t Fix the Suicide Crisis”
https://bit.ly/3mkNFIC
Article 100
“To learn from a psychedelic trip, explore the dreams that follow
The psychedelic renaissance is fully upon us. Clinicians, directors of spiritual communities and others are engaged in the implementation of a bevy of psychedelic medicines to treat everything from major depression to problematic substance use to existential angst.”
https://bit.ly/3mdAzwK
Article 99
“Deep Intellect
Inside the mind of the octopus”
https://bit.ly/37PRDRa
Article 98
“What a Cult Steals from You
Money. Time. Bodily integrity.
Relationships. Opportunity. Altruism.”
http://bit.ly/3xJHX4U
Article 97
“Under pressure: why athletes choke
What makes an elite sports star suddenly unable to do the very thing they have been practising for years? And is there anything they can do about it?”
https://bit.ly/3xlhk68
Article 96
“Hi, Dear
The internet was meant to transform how India falls in love. Instead, it revolutionised how we creep each other out.”
http://bit.ly/3C0ndJK
Article 95
“The Most Dangerous Censorship
Invisible but present, and far from the eyes of the public”
http://bit.ly/3i8vGTa
Article 94
“Doing the Naked Macarena
Why I would go on a naked cruise again in a heartbeat”
http://bit.ly/3zJM0zw
Article 93
“Imagine you could insert knowledge into your mind: should you?”
https://bit.ly/3zviEVy
Article 92
”The Epidemic of Isolation Among Young Men
Why are we so squeamish about male friendship?”
http://bit.ly/3r5jpSt
Article 91
”How to gain more from your reading
There’s more to words than meets the eye. Deepen your appreciation of literature through the art of slow, attentive reading”
https://bit.ly/3i4r0wb
Article 90
”The Hazards of a “Nice” Company Culture”
Article 89
“The Talk
A new sex ed program for boys asks them to explore the question of what makes a good man”
https://bit.ly/3yISWgH
Article 88
“The Omnipresence of Work
Humankind holds power over its creations for one silly reason: The mind doesn’t have an off switch.”
https://bit.ly/3fuJ0Pg
Article 87
“Recognising the rhythm in addiction offers new ways to escape it
Barut was a heavy user of heroin substitutes and crack when we met in Paris in 2014. He’d grown up in what he called a ‘broken home’ in Bulgaria, and started with hard drugs early. Heroin then caught him during construction jobs in Spain and later in Paris.”
https://bit.ly/2S7NYJx
Article 86
“When Your Disorder Doesn’t Exist
‘Medically unexplained’ symptoms are as misunderstood as they are common. Here’s what I wish people knew.”
http://bit.ly/3uMpkgf
Article 85
“The Sexual Identity That Emerged on TikTok
Amid progress toward transgender acceptance, the social-media war over “super-straight” shows how not to resolve delicate questions about dating norms.”
http://bit.ly/33rO8y9
Article 84
“If you think you’ve got a porn addiction, you probably haven’t”
https://bit.ly/3nGWQ4G
Article 83
“The Identity Hoaxers
What if people don’t just invent medical symptoms to get attention—what if they feign oppression, too?”
https://bit.ly/3apBovG
Article 82
“The Weak Case for Grit
Where’s the evidence that grit predicts success?”
https://bit.ly/3tznBub
Article 81
“It’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives.
“To adult” is to complete your to-do list — but everything goes on the list, and the list never ends.
The carrot dangling in front of us is the dream that the to-do list will end, or at least become far more manageable.”
http://bit.ly/3cI0GXr
Article 80
“Stereotypical portrayals too often focus on the rituals and portray none of the nuanced, often agonized thinking behind them. Consequently, it’s become common—and even acceptable—for anyone who likes things in order or who keeps a clean house to use the OCD label to describe themselves.
“I’m so OCD” has become a joke, a shorthand for being clean or organized.”
http://bit.ly/3rBvrkT
Article 79
“What Makes You You?
When you say the word “me,” you probably feel pretty clear about what that means. It’s one of the things you’re clearest on in the whole world—something you’ve understood since you were a year old. You might be working on the question, “Who am I?” but what you’re figuring out is the who am part of the question—the I part is obvious. It’s just you. Easy.”
https://bit.ly/30yevkj
Article 78
“How to speak in public
Public speaking can feel like an ordeal, but take a lesson from the ancients: it’s a skill you can develop like any other”
http://bit.ly/3v0rc5i
Article 77
“The superpower of tomorrow? Being “indistractable” Learn how to take back control of your attention span”
http://bit.ly/3bWpOrY
Article 76
“The Pascal of the North‘Philosopher of the Heart’”
http://bit.ly/3bJnq7E
Article 75
“The Science Behind Miracles
How our minds push our bodies to defy expectations, beliefs, and even our own biology—in short, to make miracles”
https://bit.ly/2ZnJMpr
Article 74
“The Internet of Beefs”
http://bit.ly/3rK4hJh
Article 73
“The overall summary of all of this is that they’re bad forgetters,” he said. And forgetting is what humans do; often what we need to do.
The “peculiar mixture of forgetting with our remembering,” wrote William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, “is the very keel on which our mental ship is built.” “If we remembered everything,” he continued, “we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.””
http://bit.ly/3qprY8U
Article 72
“A Deeper Longing
The teenagers often ask me, “Aren’t you sad that you will never have sex?” I answer: “Yes, a part of me is sad about that, but it is not a hopeless sadness.” Sadness and loneliness are part of the point of celibacy. “
http://bit.ly/3rIDm12
Article 71
“The mystery of the Gatwick drone
A drone sighting caused the airport to close for two days in 2018, but despite a lengthy police investigation, no culprit was ever found. So what exactly did people see in the Sussex sky?”
https://bit.ly/39Rsesy
Article 70
“In Nyāya philosophy only some debates are worth having
In premodern India, debates were entertainment in courtly settings, a sport for profiteers and clever men who enjoyed a quick turn of phrase or put-down. Successful debaters gained followers, fame, even wealth.”
http://bit.ly/2JY5sVn
Article 69
“In the chaos of raising a toddler there lies a path to nirvana
It’s hard to be philosophical if you’re worried about paying rent or your physical safety.”
https://bit.ly/3g9fZsa
Article 68
“Commodity of Doom
Elegies for the cigarette”
https://bit.ly/3eUv7Je
Article 67
“The problem with love is deciding who’s doing the dishes”
https://bit.ly/3eslphj
Article 66
“How to Stop Feeling Crushed for Time
Quit worrying whether time is money. Start appreciating time’s true value.”
https://bit.ly/34ZaZTg
Article 65
“How a Bizarre Claim About Masks Has Lived on for Months
Why the wrong idea that wearing a mask can harm your health has lived on through multiple debunkings”
https://bit.ly/3nRF6Dn
Article 64
“Now you see it
Our brains predict the outcomes of our actions, shaping reality into what we expect. That’s why we see what we believe”
https://bit.ly/36XvK2N
Article 63
“What We Lose When We Hide Our Smiles Behind a Mask”
https://bit.ly/33ln5VG
Article 62
“Denham offered his sign in 1575. A mirrored question mark, he hoped, would flag up a rhetorical question, making it easier to get the drift of the writer’s intention. But it never caught on.”
https://bit.ly/36c8iyA
Article 61
“Kierkegaard on Why Anxiety Powers Creativity Rather Than Hindering It
“Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self… — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.””
https://bit.ly/3mFR2rd
Article 60
“The self of self-help books is adrift from social and economic facts”
https://bit.ly/2Pw3FWn
Article 59
“Is Everyone Depressed?
Suddenly, many people meet the criteria for clinical depression. Doctors are scrambling to determine who needs urgent intervention, and who is simply the new normal.”
https://bit.ly/3f6mpWZ
Article 58
“Why it pays to be grumpy and bad-tempered”
https://bbc.in/2WJFeZU
Article 57
“The Role of Cognitive Dissonance in the Pandemic
The minute we make any decision—I think COVID-19 is serious; no, I’m sure it is a hoax—we begin to justify the wisdom of our choice and find reasons to dismiss the alternative.”
https://bit.ly/2ZEWQrp
Article 56
“Army Ranger School Is a Laboratory of Human Endurance.
The military’s toughest training challenges have a lot in common with outdoor sufferfests like the Barkley Marathons and the Leadville Trail 100: you have to be fit and motivated to make the starting line, but your mind and spirit are what carry you to the end. A Ranger graduate breaks down an ordeal that shapes some of the nation’s finest soldiers.”
https://bit.ly/3heRVmX
Article 55
“The privilege of boredom
How philosophy can happen in isolation”
https://bit.ly/2NExRhc
Article 54
“There have always been drug addicts in need of help, but the scale of the present wave of heroin and . . “
https://bit.ly/2YbZmot
Article 53
“A touch of absurdity can help to wrap your mind around reality
And now for something completely different: how a dose of the surreal or absurd helps to make sense of our place in the world”
https://bit.ly/2Y5q8NZ
Article 52
“How to Master the Invisible Hand That Shapes Our Lives”
https://bit.ly/2U4EgpE
Article 51
“I share dozens of links on Twitter and Facebook. But how many do I read in full? How many do I share after reading the full thing? Honestly—and I feel comfortable saying this because even mom’s stopped reading at this point—not too many.”
https://bit.ly/2XChR3Y
Article 50
“Impostor syndrome: do you sometimes feel like a fraud?
Many people feel like they are just waiting to be found out. Clancy Martin investigates the modern epidemic of impostor syndrome”
https://bit.ly/2ZJYgl0
Article 49
“Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours
My life seemed to be getting busier, faster: I felt constantly short of time – so I stepped outside it for a day and a night and did nothing.”
https://bit.ly/3bBiSxW
Article 48
“Gradually, the notion of nostalgia attached itself almost exclusively to soldiers—Swiss mercenaries being very popular hires in armies across the continent and doctors being a regular part of army life. It would take a little more than two centuries for doctors to figure out that there might be something more than a mysterious nerve disorder causing young men whose sole job was dismembering other humans and dying gruesomely to yearn for the comforts of home”
https://bit.ly/3dTJuw3
Article 47
“If we are to settle the Solar System astronauts will have to travel for months and years. Are these missions too taxing for human minds?”
https://bbc.in/3cWyZr8
Article 46
“If society is fractured today, if we truly care less about one another, some of the blame lies with the values parents have elevated. In our own lives, we’ve observed many fellow parents becoming so focused on achievement that they fail to nurture kindness. They seem to regard their children’s accolades as a personal badge of honor—and their children’s failures as a negative reflection on their own parenting.”
https://bit.ly/3bs0ecY
Article 45
“Nothing has all of the ingredients for the emotional breakdown recipe quite like a pandemic-induced global shutdown. Lack of face-to-face socializing and general social isolation? Check. Financial uncertainty and mass unemployment? Check. Lack of regular exercise, sunlight, and access to basic necessities? Check. High uncertainty of one’s safety and security in the near future? Check. Tons of free-time to refresh news feeds five thousand times per day? Double check.”
https://bit.ly/2VCy9ZI
Article 44
“What is wrong with this picture? Why do modern ‘evidence-based’ treatments fail to produce better outcomes? Indeed, why do things seem to be getting worse, with many forms of suffering, even suicide, on the rise?
Sigmund Freud said that work and love are the cornerstones of our lives and human meaning, and the kinds of transformations in work and love that I was able to achieve are exactly what Freud said good therapy of depth, insight and relationship is for.”
https://bit.ly/2RIy0mr
Article 43
“More than five tonnes of Calpol is sold every day – and more than 12 million units each year. Other brands cost half the price, but Calpol has 70% of the market for children’s pain-relief medicine, which is three times the share of its nearest competitor and 50 times more than the next most popular brand of paracetamol. For British parents, Calpol is overwhelmingly the drug of choice.”
https://bit.ly/2WvNdKO
Article 42
“Jacob is just one of a growing number of people seeking inspiration from business schools rather than poetry in the quest to find the right partner. This hard-headed attitude is evident in the practical turn that romance’s ardent lexicon has taken in recent years. We look for partners, not soulmates. We avoid deal-breakers. “Are you in the right headspace to receive information that might hurt you?” reads a recent meme, advising people to ask loved ones for consent before making demands on their emotional labour.”
http://bit.ly/33AcPaQ
Article 41
Brilliant writeup on life and What is important. CAT Aspirant or not, this is a must read.
“On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not.”
http://bit.ly/38G0nI2
Article 40
“In this vehicle that dwarfed even the beefiest of men, Schwarzenegger saw a business opportunity. He contacted AM General, the heavy-automotive manufacturer behind the Humvee (the military vehicle on which the Hummer is based) and other purpose-driven vehicles, to communicate his adoration. He was sure the Hummer needed to be made available for purchase to regular people, and though the company was initially hesitant, the Hummer was introduced to the civilian market in 1992.”
http://bit.ly/36KEgOQ
Article 39
“In a famous experiment, when participants were presented with evidence counter to their political beliefs, areas of their brain associated with physical pain became more active — it’s as if being wrong physically hurts.”
http://bit.ly/2PZIPQB
Article 38
“PICTURE THIS: everyone in your life is obsessed with ice cream, and you just don’t understand the hype. You’ve tasted it, and maybe you’ve even enjoyed it from time to time, but you don’t actively crave it like the people around you seem to—nor do you centre your life around it like they do. “Can’t wait to get some ice cream!” they effervesce in tweets and Facebook posts, and you wonder why. Dates with potential romantic partners, and even get-togethers with friends, often seem organized around the acquisition or discussion of ice cream, pushing you further into an isolation that feels like your own doing.”
http://bit.ly/3917884
Article 37
“I know I’m not alone. We all know that person: there’s the child minder who is always late, the colleague who misses every deadline, even if just by a few hours, the friend you must tell to arrive 30 minutes earlier than she needs to for your lunch reservation.”
https://bbc.in/2rThZAo
Article 36
“The most surprising result of the study was that the non-demanding task was actually better than doing nothing,” Schooler says. Why this is so, however, is less clear. “My best guess is that if you’re engaged in a non-demanding task, it kind of prevents you from having long trains of thought,” Schooler posits. “It’s sort of churning things up, stirring the pot, so you’re not maintaining one thought for a particularly long time. There are a lot of different ideas going in and out, and that sort of associative process leads to creative incubation.”
http://bit.ly/2YSDRYn
Article 35
“From now on, he always consults the dice. Since it has six sides, he gives it six options. The first is to do what he has always done. The five others depart more or less distinctly from this routine. Once it has been subjected to the dice, even the most anodyne choice – that of a film, a restaurant – opens a vast array of possibilities for putting your routine behind you.”
http://bit.ly/2EerJHQ
Article 34
“Ironically, accusing others of virtue signalling might itself constitute virtue signalling – just signalling to a different audience. Whether it should be counted as virtue signalling or not, the accusation does exactly what it accuses others of: it moves the focus from the target of the moral claim to the person making it. It can therefore be used to avoid addressing the moral claim made.”
http://bit.ly/2P9Dx2Y
Article 33
Brilliant passage that delves deep on solitude, herd mentality, moral stance, introspection, leadership and many other ideas in a beautiful, coherent way. Must Read.
“Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.”
http://bit.ly/2lW7nxe
Article 32
“They would follow him from room to room, everywhere he went in the house, and lie down next to him while he slept. Crawled on, dribbled on, kicked, elbowed and kneed: these occurrences were all treated with a resigned fatalism. The fingers in the eye they received on a daily basis would be shrugged off with an almost Zen-like calm. In many respects, they were better parents than me. If my son so much as squeaked during the night, I would instantly feel two cold noses pressed in my face: get up, you negligent father — your son needs you.”
http://bit.ly/2ZlSRNa
Article 31
“I broke this cycle when my daughters were born and I realised that it would be irresponsible to stop treatment because being a good father meant having a stable mood. It was a purely pragmatic decision, made without resolving the existential issues that antidepressants had raised for me before. That being the case, I do not write with the fervour of the newly converted, although sometimes I speculate about how much smoother my life would have been had I decided much sooner to stick to the antidepressants.”
http://bit.ly/2N5oKqL
Article 30
“Never underestimate the willingness of a man to believe flattering things about himself.” Samuelson was not a behavioral economist, but he clearly recognized that people’s self-assessments were often higher than warranted by objective evidence. In surveys, for example, more than 90 percent of people describe themselves as above-average drivers. The same self-assessment was reported by more than 80 percent of drivers surveyed while they were in the hospital recovering from accidents, many of which they had surely caused themselves.
http://bit.ly/2Tjtw4Y
Article 29
“The worker is the hamster, consumer culture is the hamster wheel. People are tricked into believing that Furbies, iPads and all those other pointless goods and services are necessary for a happy and fulfilled existence. A sense of ‘meaning’ has been replaced with instant, short-term, on-demand happiness.”
http://bit.ly/30ZbCaC
Article 28
Freud believed that, over the course of human history, humankind had suffered three ‘great outrages upon its naïve self-love’. First, there was Copernicus, who, with his finding that the Earth revolved around the Sun, showed that we were not at the centre of the Universe; second, there was Charles Darwin who, with his theory of evolution, showed that we emerged from the animal kingdom, and did not exist apart from it; last, there was Freud himself (he was never one for modesty), via whom psychoanalysis had shown that man was ‘not even master in his own house’ due to the massive effects of the unconscious.
http://bit.ly/2SdCb8I
Article 27
Vohs, who has studied the effect of choice on consumers for many years, found in a recent project that even making pleasant choices can deplete one’s mental resources, making a person less able to concentrate later.
http://bit.ly/2RYv6st
Article 26
At night, the sky is a watercolor wash. Sunset tries to push in but day resists, never giving over to real darkness, instead smudging the blue over the glaciers peach and mauve. Waterfalls of glacial rock glow rose and coral in the perma-dusk. Clouds roll in just to catch the pinkish light. Distant peaks are scoops of sorbet. Everything seems impossibly far apart, held together precariously in any moment by the eye, always about to drift even farther.
http://bit.ly/2YDZScR
Article 25
Lunch usually consisted of salad. I would choose three different vegetables or fruits. The first thing I would do was smell the items for freshness and run my fingers over them—a process that filled me with a mixture of delight and disgust. “These are pure enough,” I used to say to myself. Then I would go about washing each one, cutting them in a set order, weighing each portion, and methodically arranging the foods on a plate.
http://bit.ly/2FqAe3G
Article 24
A phobia is generally considered “an exaggerated usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation”.
Mussolini didn’t eat mashed potatoes because they gave him a headache. Idi Amin doesn’t seem like he’d have been a fussy eater, but he had his limits, “I tried human flesh, and it is too salty for my taste.” Of course the reader can’t be sure if this flesh was raw or cooked: if the latter, then surely the saltiness was the fault of the cook.
http://bit.ly/2Mzqbix
Article 23
Forget about RC. Forget about reading practice. Forget about CAT. Read this brilliant and short write-up about scarcity, abundance and generosity.
“Imagine that out of the blue, you tell your child you’re going to go for ice cream. Five minutes later, tell them you’ve changed your mind and you’ll go some other time.”
http://bit.ly/2QEzMmO
Article 22
“I don’t understand how people…live. It’s amazing to me that people wake up every morning and say, ‘Yeah, another day, let’s do it.’ How do people do it? I don’t know how.”
“It doesn’t matter where you are, it’s who you are. And that’s not gonna change whether you’re in California or Maine or New Mexico. You know, you can’t escape…you.”
http://bit.ly/2Xfwetr
Article 21
“Flashback to early capitalism: the Protestant ethic sucked up happy-go-lucky peasants and churned out industrious wage slaves. Flash forward to digital capitalism, which sucks up helpless little babies and churns out Facebook slaves who labour for the likes and turn the conversation to themselves at every opportunity.
Basically, narcissism is the new herpes. It’s not like you got it on purpose, you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now everyone’s pointing fingers and trying to pretend they don’t have it, too. Hence the blame game.”
http://bit.ly/30K32Nj
Article 20
Brilliant perception of death and grief. Will make lot more sense if you have ever lost someone close to heart.
“Death really is the manifestation of the ordinary to everyone except the griever. Barthes’s experience of looking at the Winter Garden image cannot be reproduced because his loss cannot be reproduced. If by merely looking at Henriette as a child we could feel what Barthes feels, grief would be translatable in a way that anyone who has grieved knows it is certainly not.”
http://bit.ly/2Qo0CiB
Article 19
“Three features of the definition stand out: the outsider status of intellectuals, their extraordinariness or even their singularity, and their politics.”
“He’s driving his truck, saying “Taco should be a verb.” The taco, he says, is heated on the griddle, and the counterman slides meat onto it and sauces it and hands it to you and you eat it, all in one extended motion. “I know it’s overly romantic,””
http://bit.ly/2wmW9Ux
Article 18
“Take Immanuel Kant’s elegant formulation of how to do the right thing: act in ways that could be generalized to universal principles. You’ll choose the right thing to do, every time, if you ask yourself: If everyone acted in this way, would the world be a better place? Reason will always guide you to the right answer, and to its corollary, which is that we should treat others never as means but always as ends in themselves. The narcissist, in contrast, always chooses to act in exactly such a way that if everyone were to follow suit, the world would go straight to hell.”
http://bit.ly/2Hr7klq
Article 17
“More practically, the idea of niksen is to take conscious, considered time and energy to do activities like gazing out of a window or sitting motionless. The less-enlightened might call such activities “lazy” or “wasteful.” Again: nonsense.”
https://nyti.ms/2HcH2lq
Article 16
“At the time, this was a radical idea – and it still is. It essentially suggests that the brain makes no distinction between a broken bone and an aching heart. Rejection, it tells us, actually hurts.
‘It’s not just in our head. It is in our head because it’s in our brain.’
Some participants were told that everyone had picked them, while others were told that no one had. In the end, when all the students rated their feelings, the rejected group showed no change in emotions: instead of feeling upset, they seemed to have become emotionally numb.”
http://bit.ly/2PG0s6c
Article 15
“Today, with the pollution that new technologies have brought to our information ecosystem, this distinction is no longer so easy to make. And this is the real problem, and danger, of satire: not that it mocks and belittles respect-worthy pieties, not that it “punches down,” but that it has become impossible to separate it cleanly from the toxic disinformation that defines our era.”
https://nyti.ms/2Isjj2G
Article 14
“Narcissism gives you the confidence to believe you can achieve great things. It’s hard to imagine someone other than Steve Jobs having the grandiose vision of creating Apple. And we’re all drawn to that confidence — it’s why narcissists are more likely to rise up the ranks of the corporate elite and get elected to political office. But alone, narcissism is dangerous. Studies show that tech companies with narcissistic CEOs have more fluctuating, volatile performance.”
http://bit.ly/2VwE1Cg
Article 13
“My dissatisfaction was whiny and irrational, as I well knew, so I kept it to myself. When I thought about it—which I did, a lot—I rejected the term midlife crisis, because I was holding a steady course and never in fact experienced a crisis: more like a constant drizzle of disappointment. What annoyed me most of all, much more than the disappointment itself, was that I felt ungrateful, the last thing in the world I was entitled to be.”
http://bit.ly/2uPVzOb
Article 12
“This terrorism takes the form of what psychologists call ‘intrusive thoughts’ — unwanted, painful thoughts or images that invade one’s consciousness, triggering profound fear and anxiety. This is the ‘obsessive’ part of OCD, and it can arise in even the most mundane circumstances. Sitting here typing, for example, I sometimes feel modest pain in my fingers, and my mind kicks into gear: You’re typing too much and causing permanent damage to your hands. Feel those little irritations at the second knuckle of your left ring finger? Those are the harbingers of arthritis. This is how it starts.”
http://bit.ly/2U9qNPd
Article 11
““If you stop logging into Facebook, you’re not going to get the shakes and start vomiting and going into physical withdrawals,” Baumer says. It’s more like a gambling problem, he says, because “it’s less a question of addiction and more a question of impulse control.””
http://bit.ly/2Fxvfgy
Article 10
“If you tell me to calm down, I probably won’t. The same goes for: “be reasonable,” “get over it already,” “you’re overreacting,” “it was just a joke,” “it’s not such a big deal.” When someone minimizes my feelings, my self-protective reflexes kick in. My body, my mind, my job, my interests, my talents—these are all “mine”—but nothing has quite the power to declare itself as “mine” as a passionate emotion does. When waves of anger or love or grief wash over me, that emotion feels like life itself. It wells up from an innermost core, like my voice, which it usually inflects. And so if you move to tamp it down, I parry by shutting you out: I erect walls around my sanctum sanctorum, to shield the flame of my passion—my life—from your soul-quenching intrusions. Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot feel?!”
http://bit.ly/2Tdwu9P
Article 9
“In her book on international adoption, historian Karen Dubinsky writes about rumors circulating in Guatemala that foreigners abduct local children and turn them into sex slaves or steal their organs. Illustrating the power such falsehoods can have, tourists have been lynched as a result of the accusations.”
http://bit.ly/2TEpI0S
Article 8
Generally, when authors base their articles on research from studies,, I am cynical. But this is an idea that I definitely buy into – Anger leads to more anger. Anger, and as an extent, emotions can be contagious.
“He says when he wrote those angry tweets, he was in a bad place, angry at himself for letting his health deteriorate: “It was easy to snap back and snarl.” But Beatty says the empathy shown toward him changed him. He has begun to think, “People are good.” He realizes that politics divide people, but one on one, “people are caring, generous, helpful.” “
https://n.pr/2C0CtsI
Article 7
“You cannot convey the pure concussive terror of a panic attack in words either, the sense that all your bones are thrumming a bad, insistent chord. I have tried to explain why I must leave the restaurant, why I must have an aisle seat at the show, why sometimes my throat seizes so powerfully I can’t even drink water. Some friends and family members understand; others don’t; and I hide my phobias when I can.”
http://bit.ly/2UfFJHD
Article 6
“What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”
https://bit.ly/2NoK1tE
Article 5
When we are living in a world where we don’t have time for boredom, We might even get existential crisis if the sitcom that one’s watching gets over. I can’t remember a time in the last five years or so when I was bored. I do remember times when I was bored in my childhood and had lot of time to just be with my thoughts, imagination, creatures in my head and fantasy lands. Oh I wish I can get those back.
“You are bored. And I’m going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it’s boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it’s on you to make life interesting, the better off you’ll be.”
https://nyti.ms/2UMvvhQ
Article 4
“I have read that Tinder users agree that one should “swipe left’” (i.e. reject) on any prospective mate or hookup who proclaims a fondness for, among other writers, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway or William S. Burroughs. I couldn’t care less about the first two of these, but Burroughs is very important to me. He played a vital role in shaping how I see the world (Cities of the Red Night, in particular), and I would want any person with whom I spend much time communicating to know this. I believe I have good reasons for valuing him, and would be happy to talk about these reasons.”
http://bit.ly/38v9gE5
Article 3
“I still have the memory of what it’s like when the depersonalisation lifts. Those are periods of such indescribable joy. They’re memories I try to hang on to when things get tough – memories of just sitting at my tiny kitchen table in my flat, without feeling the need to achieve or function or engage. Just being. Just living.”
http://bit.ly/37ceUdS
Article 2
“Wolf does not mean to suggest that non-moral equals immoral: just because something doesn’t have anything to do with morality (playing tennis, for instance) it does not follow that it is therefore morally bad. The point is that morality is, intuitively, focused on issues such as treating others equally, and on trying to relieve suffering. And good things these are: but so is holidaying with a friend, or exploring the Alaskan rain forest, or enjoying a curry. Moral goodness is just one aspect of the good things in life and, if you live as if the moral aspect is the only aspect that matters, then you are likely to be very impoverished in terms of the non-moral goods in your life. And that means missing out on a lot.”
http://bit.ly/2PM2tvJ
Article 1
“It had become, in Clark’s words, “transparent equipment.” And the physiological effects of losing that equipment were acute: my heart began to race in the Verizon store when the employee told me he was deactivating my phone, and in the following hours and days, I would frequently find myself reaching for my iPhone, the way a girl reaches for a non-existent ponytail after a drastic haircut. Of course, I would gradually begin to notice not being able to use Google Maps or post to Instagram, but the physical sense of loss was instantaneous and intense. I literally felt a part of me was missing.”
http://bit.ly/2uodfmT
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