Life

Weber's German word for a vocation, Beruf, contains two resonances: the gradual accumulation of knowledge and skills and the ever-stronger conviction that one was meant to do this one particular thing in one's life.

An English locution roughly conveys what he meant: your life 'adds up'.

One of the great, but often unmentioned, causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kind of walls, chairs, buildings and streets we’re surrounded by.

And yet a concern for architecture and design is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. The Architecture of Happiness starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be – and argues that it is architecture’s task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.

If I don't ask, I won't get.

Back before COVID-19 hit the global scene, I thought it would be pleasant to have a list of the good things in life. This list wouldn’t be an exhaustive account of all the checked boxes on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but rather would document small pleasures which evoke some kind of clear and specific emotional response. If I had The Sads, I could pull up this list and sink down into the sensory details of, say, that strong hit of pine scent you randomly get on a hiking trail.

Now that we’re all in the thick of this pandemic, this new tiny side project—Good Things—has offered me a peaceful little portal to things I miss. Your mileage may vary, but I’ve found that reading my personal list of good things can be comforting as I help protect my community by sheltering in place.

This talk is actually about a way of living your life that most people don’t talk about. As you approach your career, you’ll hear a lot about following your passion, or doing something you love. I’m going to talk about something kind of different. I’m going to talk about following a principle — finding a guiding principle for your work, something you believe is important and necessary and right, and using that to guide what you do.

There are three parts to this talk. I’m first going to talk about the principle that guides a lot of my work, and try to give you a taste of what comes out of that. And I’m going to talk about some other people that have lived this way; what their principles are, what they believe in. But these are all just examples, to help you think about what you believe in, and how you want to live your life.

to re-enchant the egg feels powerful at this moment. today more than ever, we need its patient, protected optimism.

for me, “egg” is most importantly a metaphor for nurturing structures we provide others and sometimes ourselves. it’s not always easy to create our own eggs, or self-nurturing containers. studying eggs helps us create better ones in the future. others might call it a support structure, as édouard tweeted, “more often than not, the most meaningful human activity boils down to providing support structures for one another.”

if there is anything specific i learned from curating my collection of eggs and sharing these thoughts and anecdotes on them, it’s that the word “honor” is important to me. as i mentioned, i have this theory that when artists use eggs in their work, often they are simply honoring them. in other words, they are shining a light on the egg somehow: so that we can see it anew, as if for the first time.

So I'd like you to think about when was the last time you thought about something for an entire hour? Like nobody bothered you and you had an idea and you sat for an hour and thought about it. How about for a whole day? Does everybody remember the last time they sat and thought about something for a whole day? How about over a course of a month? You had something you were working on and obviously, not spending all the time every day when you started thinking for a month. Or a year? These are tremendously valuable moments if you get to have them at all. I consider myself extremely lucky to have had the ability to think about probably three different things for a year or more.

There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he’d completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a dozen critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and—even more important—on his writing.

A book about a decade of walking. It's where I’ve tried to distill why it is that I walk so much: Walking as a way to become who I wanted to become but didn’t know how to. Walking as a way to reflect on where it is that we come from. And walking as a way to bear witness to a certain grace visible only when you’re bored out of your skull, when you’ve been walking for weeks on end, and when you think you should just pack it up and go home. There, at that point of exhaustion, appears a little thing — a hello, the smallest gesture, something that becomes, yes, almost supernatural, spiritual in a way that is impossible to recognize amid the average day-to-day routine. Something you can only see in that elevated rhythm of the walk.

This is a book of those moments.

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.  It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering.  This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.

Since largely escaping the office, my "work" has been very different...Some of this is a real accomplishment, some of this isn't2, and the jury is still out on a fair whack of it.

But the character of the work itself is very, very different. For one thing, I am earning A$90K less per year (i.e, losing that money in opportunity cost) because I refused to take a five-day-a-week gig last year, and currently receive only about A$1.7K a year for my writing, but I value that little bit of money so much more. It just about pays for all my music classes being forty-five minutes instead of thirty minutes, and I savour every second of them because I feel like I've earned them producing something that brings people joy.

In fact, there are all sorts of stark differences. When I went to an office, I'd have days where I'd drag myself out of bed and wish I could get just a little more sleep in, but the neighbor's dog woke me up at 5AM. Now I wake up and think, "Well, I'd love to sleep a bit more, but I get to make a cup of tea and enjoy working in that beautiful moment before the world is fully awake." I frequently force myself not to roll out of bed and start writing within a minute of waking up in a desperate bid to maintain some semblance of not being a Ritalin-addled Silicon Valley "thought leader". This is a relationship with labour that I never expected to experience, and it really is wonderful.

Seamless connects familiar objects from everyday life into a three-dimensional network

Sze incorporates objects designed for human scale, such as tools for installing sculpture such as a ladder and a spirit level. Other components, like the tiny wooden bridges, could imply a miniature scale. The sculpture sweeps across the space in delicate curves, connecting the objects into a single larger construction. The spiralling structures suggest the double helix shape of DNA – molecules that determine the growth and reproduction of all living things.

Although titled Seamless, the work draws attention to the ‘seams’ of the museum’s architecture. Several rectangles are cut into the walls where the sculpture penetrates. They reveal the construction of the museum building and the functional spaces behind its pristine ‘white cube’ galleries.

What might a forest say to a satellite — or to us? Perhaps its communication is more ambient and affective than semantic. Earlier this year, amidst the long, dark days of the pandemic winter, I happened upon a sound archive, tree.fm, that combines photographs and audio recordings to allow you to view and listen to forests around the world; the site’s tagline is “listen to a random forest.” I tweeted about it, and other cabin-feverish folks seemed appreciative. “I’m so starved for other places, this almost made me cry,” was one response. Another responder did cry, at least in emoji. Yet my caption, quoting the tagline, seemed to mislead and even frustrate commenters from the tech world. Apparently, they were expecting to encounter an algorithm and were disappointed to be immersed instead in the rustling leaves of Atatürk Arboretum, in Istanbul, or the birdsong of Bitza Nature Park, in Moscow, or the rushing water of a coastal forest, in Ibiza. Here the randomness wasn’t about parallel computational processing; rather, it was about a kind of grounded sublimity, a sensation of poetic disorientation as one forest after another materialized onscreen.

The popularity of hiking surged during the pandemic. For centuries forests have redeemed us humans. Now we must reciprocate that redemption.

this metaphor feels so true to me because life, itself, is dependent on water as source. thus, creativity is a form of psychic water — sometimes materialized. these two truths I always knew.

but to extend the water-as-life and water-as-system metaphor to everything in our internet practice — is then to make even the act of sending a newsletter, or hitting “publish” on a post — contain the energy of that which is life-giving, essential, and sacred. in this model, everything is connected. I’ve decided that this is the way I want to be on the internet, and this is the kind of world I want to build.

Our goal in archiving the work of Christopher Alexander and the Center for Environmental Structure is to make it accessible throughout the world to all those who wish to build and repair living environments in which people thrive.

Our current definition of “productivity” is broken. It pushes us to treat busyness as a proxy for useful effort, leading to impossibly lengthy task lists and ceaseless meetings. We’re overwhelmed by all we have to do and on the edge of burnout, left to decide between giving into soul-sapping hustle culture or rejecting ambition altogether. But are these really our only choices?

For some of us—isolates, happy in the dark—code is therapy, an escape and a path to hope in a troubled world.

...Moving through that jumble [of the command line]—with all of its perverted poetics of grep and vi and git and apache and *.ini—*and doing so with a fingers-floating-across-the-keyboard balletic grace, is exhilarating. You feel like an alchemist. And you are. You type esoteric words— near gibberish—into a line-by-line text interface, and with a rush not unlike pulling Excalibur from the stone you've just scaffolded a simple application that can instantly be accessed by a vast number of humans worldwide.

...I find peace in the dark mess of that world. Code and servers are a home to me in a way that's difficult to explain to anyone for whom they are not.

Sometimes life presents you with a choice. Or does it? There’s a lesson to be learned here. Maybe not all decisions are important and sometimes what matters is to keep moving forward.

Holzer began creating these works in 1977, when she was a student in an independent study program. She hand-typed numerous "one liners," or Truisms, which she has likened, partly in jest, to a "Jenny Holzer's Reader's Digest version of Western and Eastern thought." She typeset the sentences in alphabetical order and printed them inexpensively, using commercial printing processes. She then distributed the sheets at random and pasted them up as posters around the city. Her Truisms eventually adorned a variety of formats, including T-shirts and baseball caps.

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.

There are words we use to describe this quality:

alive
whole
comfortable
free
exact
egoless
eternal

But in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it.

The “Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller),” built by architects/artists Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, are the first residential units designed “not to die.”

Today I want to discuss just one bedrock of real world life that is often neglected—or frequently even mocked: Ritual.

I know how much I rely on my daily rituals as a way of creating wholeness and balance. I spend every morning in an elaborate ritual involving breakfast, reading books (physical copies, not on a screen), listening to music, and enjoying home life.

Even my morning coffee preparation is ritualistic. (However, I’m not as extreme as this person—who rivals the Japanese tea ceremony in attention to detail.)

I try to avoid plugging into the digital world until after noon.

I look forward to this daily time away from screens. But my personal rituals are just one tiny example. There are many larger ways that rituals provide an antidote to the more toxic aspects of tech-dominated society.

But now, says the Once-ler, Now that you're here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.

When we do not cultivate our Pillars, they grow weak and our Platform of Radiance becomes unstable, causing us to fall into one of the four Pits of Suffering below.

Each Pillar has a corresponding Pit of Suffering:

• Love > Attachment
• Compassion > Sentimentality
• Joy > Elation
• Equanimity > Apathy

I've been fortunate enough to meet some of my heroes, but I still have a long way to go.

This is a list of people I'd like to high five IRL.

The apartment I’ve lived in this past year quite frankly and very succinctly encompasses everything I kind of hate about architecture, about design, about the ways people in the profession are expected to live their lives for the benefit and the consumption of others.

...We weren’t using the apartment the right way; namely, we didn’t decorate or live like an architecture critic and a mathematician theoretically should. Our apartment wasn’t photogenic. There were too many bikes in the living room. We still had a garbage $300 Wayfair sofa that felt like sitting on cardboard. There was clutter. This beautiful apartment wasn’t meant for our kind of ordinary and this was made known several times in subtle and rather degrading ways, after which our lease was not renewed, to the relief of all parties involved. Even if it meant moving again.

The longer I lived in the apartment, the more I hated it, the more I realized that I had been fooled by nice finishes and proximity to transit into thinking it was a good apartment. As soon as we’d got in there, things started to, well, not work...All of the niceness, the glitzy brand names, the living materials were not meant for everyday use, even by gentle individuals like ourselves. They were made solely for looking at, as though that were the point of all habitation.

Answering the question is not always easy. At some point, removing another app, another service, and another line of CSS requires a lot of thought and a decision must be taken. What do I want? What do I need? What do I really need? And my examples revolve around the casual theme of tech, which is the easiest to navigate in that regard.

Sometimes I remove too many things, so I put them back.

Sometimes nothing can be removed at all: this is when I know that I’ve achieved a sort of internal peace. As it turns out, I’ve had the same Mac app setup for quite a while now: does it mean that my setup is now complete? The design of this website has been more or less the same for the last year or so: could this mean that its design is finished?

I don't envision a very long life for myself.
Like, I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?
I've designed it that way.

I enjoy gardening the most when it aligns with my broader philosophy of life, so I thought readers might like to see that philosophy and see how I apply it to gardening. These principles are in random order, just as they are applied in life. Sometimes my focus is on having fun, other times I'm focused on planning, still other times I just want to kick back and chat to my friends and neighbours.

Introduction / Pareto principle / Balance / Fun / Working for happiness / Family / Purpose / Order / Planning / Flexibility / Variety / Strategic Resilience / Motivation / Sustainability / Invest to save / Kaizen / Kindness / Giving back / Experimentation / Learning

Conceptually speaking, architects have come a long way: from the house as a machine, to the house as a machine in the garden, to the garden as a machine for living in, now scaled to the entire planet itself. But considering the current state of the environment, our terrestrial habitat is in need of repair at all scales. Affirming what should be obvious, the obligation to steward our habitat should become all the more binding. Though written some decades ago, Siza’s short reflection on a house’s need for care bears particularly heavily on our ill-fitted relationship to the built and natural environment today, that is, on our relationship to the world we have made and the world we inhabit. It is this relationship itself that is long in need of repair and, though widely acknowledged, that is not being tended to as one would a home.

[Life] frequently sets its problems in terms which must be altered if the problem is to be solved at all.

Something like an essay that Shigesato Itoi writes every day.

Philippe: Tell me, Driss, why are people interested in art?
Driss: It's all business , I guess.
Philippe: No. It's the trace of our passage on this earth.
Driss: Bullshit. For 50 euros, I'll do you a trace of my passage. I'll even add some blue!

Moved by Herbert’s words, Amy faced a pivotal choice: continue her battle against the inevitable or embrace a broader perspective of comfort. With the power still out, the house continued to cool well below her once sacrosanct threshold. She took a deep breath and smiled. Instead of despair, Amy felt an unexpected calm. She looked at Herbert and said, “Let’s get a fire going in the fireplace.” For the first time in years, she felt at peace, not in spite of the imperfection but because of it.

In the following days, Amy began experimenting with living outside her rigid expectations. She adjusted her definition of comfort to include a range of temperatures and even which parts of the home she worried about keeping comfortable. The old house, with its creaks and drafts, no longer seemed an adversary but a companion in her journey towards contentment.

Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus.

Why? Because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.

The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest.

...It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

Your vision takes off.

Back in 2019, I started collecting all kinds of metrics about my life. Every single day for the last 3 years I tracked over 100 different data types - ranging from fitness & nutrition to social life, computer usage and weather.

Naturally after I started collecting this data, I wanted to visualize what I was learning, so I created this page

"…the tendency of jobs to be adapted to tools, rather than adapting tools to jobs. If one has a hammer one tends to look for nails, and if one has a computer with a storage capacity, but no feelings, one is more likely to concern oneself with remembering and with problem solving than with loving and hating." —Silvan Tomkins

We can easily imagine from our own experience why fire might be used as a symbol of the life of a house and the family that lives there. The fire was certainly the most lifelike element of the house: it consumed food and left behind waste; it could grow and move seemingly by its own will; and it could exhaust itself and die. And most important it was warm, one of the most fundamental qualities that we associate with our own lives. When the fire dies, its remains become cold, just as the body becomes cold when a person dies. Drawing a parallel to the concept of the soul that animates the physical body of the person, the fire, then, is the animating spirit for the body of the house.

And the last, and most elusive [motivation for extreme feats of endurance], is the sense of meaning that can be found after surviving extreme conditions and perhaps even cheating death. We only truly appreciate a warm bed after trying to sleep in a bivvy bag on a cliff ledge; we value time with friends and family all the more when reminded of the fragility of life.

Self-signalling, goal completion, mastery and meaning: it’s not a particularly counterintuitive list, but it is a challenging one for economists and social scientists more broadly, because it is clear that these drives are not unique to explorers and ultramarathoners. Who among us does not value the satisfaction of achieving a goal, or finding ourselves the equal of a testing challenge?

...There is a lesson here for those pulling the levers of public policy, taxing and subsidising and regulating in an attempt to make the world a better place, and for corporations setting “compensation” packages. People want money and pleasure, but also to challenge themselves, to feel a sense of meaning and enjoy a sense of mastering their craft. Policymakers and managers ignore such desires at their peril. In each of us, there is a tiny spark of Jasmin Paris.

Benjamin: It's like there's this whole life I had, but I can't remember what it was.

The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well - the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.

If we reach such a very ordinary state of daily life, and then back it up with building and construction that comes from the depths in us, then that gradually accumulates our value in the world, all of us together as a whole. Later, then, perhaps hundreds of years later, people will look back at our stones and say to themselves, "My word, those people way back then — they certainly knew how to live," and they would say this because they could see the lingering whispers in the walls and mosses, and could read them, and could treasure them, and would learn from these traces how to live like that again.

The wind is rising!
...We must try to live.

Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still, you find reasons to keep living.

Invert the theocentric view that artificial intelligence is the coming of a god, a superintelligence inside the machine. Rather, humans are inside the superintelligence. We are inside the Earth-sized machine. It symbiotically depends on us to tend its body and microbiome.

...Now Earth is growing intelligent. Like a child learning to speak its first words, Earth will articulate its first thoughts. Earth’s thoughts may be as foreign to humans as human thoughts are to a blood cell. Unrelated in scale and pace. But this supercomplex, superintelligent superorganism will not try to destroy us, for the same reason no human wants to destroy their own blood.

What will Earth want? The same thing life has alway wanted. Earth has inherited what all living things share — the élan vital, the will to live, the abhorrence of vacuum. Earth is imbued with the desire to spread, and we are watching it undergo its first mitosis. With rockets we are giving Earth spores, so it may reproduce.

I do not listen to this kind of music for “fun” exactly, but to learn, to grow, and yes to be challenged. Good art can be challenging; the best art always challenges us, though not always in the same ways. Some books, some music, some poetry, is difficult merely for the sake of being difficult, and I have little positive to say about those works. Some art, though, is difficult because its subject matter demands it. Speaking truthfully — in verse or prose or harmonic structure — of the Son of God undergoing trial, crucifixion, death, and long lonely day in the tomb: this requires hard material to go with the hard matter at hand.

Not every work ought to be difficult. But some should.

There’s this design heuristic that if people cut across the grass, you should pave the shortcut they make. This gives the path a lovely human fit. But sometimes you want to do the opposite. You want to design ways to get people to take a longer path, a longcut, so they can see or do things they’d miss otherwise.

...It is tempting to make shortcuts. When writing or doing art or building software (or in any other way constructing paths for people to walk on), you can typically earn more if you cater to the marginal user, the one who is on the fence. But the marginal user is the least patient and least interested, so you have to simplify, reduce friction, make the path direct and unambiguous—and you end up working for the shortcut paving company.

...Almost everything that is meaningful, beautiful, life-affirming, empowering, transformational, true—it can’t be reached by shortcuts. But what we can do is make the longcuts walkable, put out footbridges and stairs, and a table where the ocean comes into view.

This is precisely where “burglary” becomes a myth, a symbol, a metaphor: it stands in for all the things people really want to do with the built environment, what they really want to do to sidestep the obstacles of their lives.

“You know you can just teach yourself, right? You don’t need a course.”

She stopped mid-step on the gravel path.

Later that day, Johanna biked up to the university library and packed a bag full of books picked semi-randomly from the shelves of education history. Then she sat down to read. She read every spare minute for a year, two years, three ...

I find these transitions lovely. Somebody notices a limitation in themselves, something they lack or have misunderstood, something they need to learn or unlearn—and then they learn it, and discover, on the other side, a richer world. For Johanna, her blindspot was a lack of understanding of herself and her agency. But these hidden limitations can take many forms. It can be a skill you lack; a lacuna of knowledge; an attitude that is coming between you and the things that you value; a needless constraint; a fear. Often they have the character of doors hiding in plain sight: obvious once you see them, but quite possible to walk straight past for years (or a lifetime).

Beware of loops. Loops kill you. With loops you don’t go anywhere. If you start feeling a loop, step back and try to refocus.

...What I was trying to convey when talking about loops, if I remember well, was something in between these two meanings, the literal and sociologic one. Something like an environment in which a person becomes so involved and enveloped in their interests and reverberations of such interests, that they lose sight of the actual importance of such interests and simultaneously of the actual influence these interests have on their worldview. That’s why I was talking about bad habits and little addictions.

Those and only those institutions that put us in possession of life's experiences are to be deemed educational...whatever economy can be employed that will give the largest round of experience in the shortest time with the least effort is the most efficient...Abstractly stated, the library is classified and organized experience.

Her favorite photo of her mom
The caption says:
"I can't believe it
It's been a decade since you've been gone
Mama, I miss you
I miss sitting with you in the front yard
Still figuring out how to keep living without you
It's got a little better, but it's still hard
Mama, I got a job I love and my own apartment
Mama, I got a boyfriend, and I'm crazy about him
Your little girl didn't do too bad
Mama, I love you, give a hug and kiss to Dad"

About a decade ago, my friend Richard wrote a short blog post entitled This is what the internet was invented for.  In it, he linked to Ian’s Shoelace Site, his point being that if you suddenly realise you’ve always laced your shoes in a particular way without really wondering whether it was the best way, then there’s probably someone out there with sufficient interest in shoelacing that they’ll have compiled everything you need to know about how to lace your shoes… and this turns out in fact to be the case.

...There are so many ways in which the internet is getting worse, and making life worse, all around us, that it’s nice to be reminded, from time to time, of all the ways in which it can also make things better.

Recently, I've been thinking that I needed to empty the backpack, before I knew what to put back in it.

Gardeners, are, by their nature, people who believe in regeneration. They understand that the broken world we inherit can also be amended, with compost, worms, and steady tending. They have seen that the tended earth, in turn, offers up radical abundance—not only of food, but of insects, birds, rhizomes, and soil.

...Of course, any garden plot is small compared to the brokenness of a wider world that can seem beyond mending...Yet sometimes, in the face of huge pain, the things of the earth—hummingbird and mockingbird, snail and earthworm—can help reroute any of us toward awe and fascination. They can reconnect us—if just for a moment—with the life-energy we need to go on. Gardens also remind us that repair need not be so far off: in daily ways, we can each build our lives toward greater diversity and abundance. Nobody needs to be hungry. When we work the right way, we can all be fed.

The series of photos of the 1959 model ends or stops with the photograph in which Kiesler triumphantly shows us the shell of his house like the remains of a creature taken from the seabed, a kind of Moby Dick harpooned and finally captured after the obsessive pursuit of a project that has taken up ten years of the life of the architect.

"I think that everybody has only one basic creative idea and no matter how he is driven off, you will find that he always comes back to it until he has a chance to prove it in purity, or die with the idea unrealized." — Frederick Kiesler

If we conclude that creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe, we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being. If so, it is a serious matter, since we have seen already the unhappy results of handling any material in a way that runs counter to the natural law of its structure.

There’s no attempt here to “reach my potential” or “turn the corner” or become a “new me,” I just decided to change these little things and keep them going at least until Easter.

My expectation was that such small changes would yield proportionately small benefits, maybe worthwhile enough to keep doing afterward. But I feel like I’m getting way more out of them than the small effort I’m putting in.

...Together my new habits take maybe 2% more effort — I have to fill up my water bottle a few more times, I have to turn off the TV and start flossing fifteen minutes earlier, and I have to choose something else to do when muscle memory has me pulling out my phone. Life has gotten much more than 2% better though. It’s more like 20%, at least. I have more time, and noticeably more energy. This is a really good deal.

Hub: Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song.

I’ve written this before but I constantly need to remind myself of it, so, once again: A certain kind of work, lifestyle, mode of living — in and of itself — is protest. That is, work that is curious and rigorous is implicitly an antipode to didactic, shallow bombastity. It is inherently an archetype against bullshit. That to be committed to this work or life of rigor (be it rigor focused on “art” or, as they say in Japanese, sakuhin, or family or athleticism or whatever), and to share it with the world is to opt-out of being paralyzed by idiocy, and help others who may be paralyzed find a path back to whatever fecundity of life it is that they deserve.

One can gain a glimpse of the quality of a people’s life by the kind of paper they use for writing letters, for literary works, and for various other tasks. Paper should not be deprecated. To do so is to deprecate beauty itself.

Many people who struggle with excessive guilt subconsciously have goals that look like this:

• I don’t want to make anyone mad.
• I don’t want to hurt anyone.
• I want to take up less space.
• I want to need fewer things.
• I don’t want my body to have needs.
• I don’t want to be a burden.
• I don’t want to fail.
• I don’t want to make mistakes.
• I don’t want to break the rules.
• I don’t want people to laugh at me.
• I want to be convenient.
• I don’t want to have upsetting emotions.
• I want to stop having feelings.

These are what I call the life goals of dead people, because what they all have in common is that the best possible person to achieve them is a corpse.

...If you want to be dead, that’s your own business. But if you would like to continue to be alive, it’s a bad idea to set goals for yourself that boil down to “try to get as close as possible to being a corpse while continuing to respire and consume nutrients.”

A couple of months ago, my eight-year-old daughter asked me, “What happens after we die?”

...I told her that one of my favorite philosophers, Epicurus, is known for a famous epitaph that states: “I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care.”

She repeated that phrase, “I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care.” She thought a bit more and said, “I like that. I think I agree with that.”

One thing I assume of age is weariness.
Damned if I don’t get more tired every day.
Tired of what I do, following arcs like lobbed rocks — the inevitability of truth.

But the complexity and the gray lie not in the truth, but in what you do with the truth once you have it.

In an intentional bout of concentrated major thinking, where you sit down with the conscious intention of confronting major questions like 'Am I currently happy?' or 'What, ultimately, do I really care about and believe in?' or— particularly if some kind of authority figure has just squeezed your shoes—'Am I essentially a worthwhile, contributing type of person or a drifting, indifferent, nihilistic person?', then the questions often end up not answered but more like beaten to death, so attacked from every angle and each angle's different objections and complications that they end up even more abstract and ultimately meaningless than when you started. Nothing is achieved this way, at least that I've ever heard of. Certainly, from all evidence, St. Paul, or Martin Luther, or the authors of The Federalist Papers, or even President Reagan never changed the direction of their lives this way—it happened more by accident.

Nothing gives man fuller satisfaction than participation in processes that supersede the span of individual life.

— Gotthard Booth

In Ancient Greece or Rome, philosophers were seen as natural authorities on the most pressing questions. However, since then, the idea of finding wisdom from philosophy has come to seem bizarre. Enter a university department today and ask to study wisdom, and you will politely but firmly be shown the door. The Consolations of Philosophy sets out to refute the notion that good philosophy must be irrelevant and gathers together six great philosophers who were convinced of the power of philosophical insight to work a practical effect on our lives.

Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are read for the light their work can shine on certain great universal problems, among them, unpopularity, poverty, inadequacy, lovelessness and timidity. The book amounts to a guide to wisdom – as well as to the practical utility of philosophy.

"To me," writes Smullyan, "Taoism means a state of inner serenity combined with an intense aesthetic awareness. Neither alone is adequate; a purely passive serenity is kind of dull, and an anxiety-ridden awareness is not very appealing."

This is more than a book on Chinese philosophy. It is a series of ideas inspired by Taoism that treats a wide variety of subjects about life in general. Smullyan sees the Taoist as "one who is not so much in search of something he hasn't, but who is enjoying what he has."

Readers will be charmed and inspired by this witty, sophisticated, yet deeply religious author, whether he is discussing gardening, dogs, the art of napping, or computers who dream that they're human.

How life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do.

So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?

Problem

No people who turn their backs on death can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society which encourages its people to live.

Solution

Never build massive cemeteries. Instead, allocate pieces of land throughout the community as grave sites—corners of parks, sections of paths, gardens, beside gateways—where memorials to people who have died can be ritually placed with inscriptions and mementos which celebrate their live. Give each grave site an edge, a path, and a quiet corner where people can sit. By custom, this is hallowed ground.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

‘You must have a vast and magnificent estate,’ said Candide to the turk.

‘I have only twenty acres,’ replied the old man; ‘I and my children cultivate them; and our labour preserves us from three great evils: weariness, vice, and want.’

Candide, on his way home, reflected deeply on what the old man had said. ‘This honest Turk,’ he said to Pangloss and Martin, ‘seems to be in a far better place than kings…. I also know,’ said Candide, ‘that we must cultivate our garden.’

In System A, creation and production are organic in character, and are governed by human judgments that emanate from the underlying wholeness of situations, conditions, and surroundings.

In System B, the production process is thought of as mechanical. What matters are regulations, procedures, categories, money, efficiency, and profit: all the machinery designed to make society run smoothly, as if society was working as a great machine. The production process is rarely context-sensitive. Wholeness is left out.

Identifying these two categories helps us sharpen and clarify the range of differences among ways of creating the environment that exist in different societies. And the two categories serve to identify a dimension of great importance: the dimension that runs from more life-giving to less life-giving.

When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and you're meant to just live your life inside the world and try not to bash into the walls too much...but life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact – and that is, that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.

Faster is not always better. Being Slow means doing everything at the correct speed: quickly, slowly or whatever pace works best. Slow means being present, living each moment fully, putting quality before quantity in everything from work and sex to food and parenting.

Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living.

He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.

Rather than convey "be like me," better parental advice should be more indirect: "This is how I lived" invites the child to reason about that example. Such advice omits "Therefore you should..." Find your own way; innovate rather than imitate.

The word “meaning” has two quite different meanings in English. It can refer to the meaning of symbols, such as words and road signs. This book is not about that kind of meaning.

People also speak of “the meaning of life.” That is the sort of meaningness this book is about. So I apply “meaningness” only to the sorts of things one could describe as “deeply meaningful” or “pretty meaningless.”

Pay attention, boy. The next suitable person you're in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, "What's wrong?" You say it in a concerned way. He'll say, "What do you mean?" You say, "Something's wrong. I can tell. What is it?" And he'll look stunned and say, "How did you know?" He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing.

When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.

We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, that living one's life is a skill that has to be acquired, like learning to ride a bicycle or play the piano. But what does wisdom counsel us to do? It tells us to aim for tranquility and inner peace, a life free from anxiety, fear, idolatry, and harmful passions. Wisdom teaches us that our first impulses may not always be trustworthy, and that our appetites will lead us astray if we do not train reason to separate vain from genuine needs.

EVEN IF, during a transitional period, we temporarily accept a rigid division between work zones and residence zones, we must at least envisage a third sphere: that of life itself (the sphere of freedom and leisure — the essence of life). Unitary urbanism acknowledges no boundaries; it aims to form an integrated human milieu in which separations such as work/leisure or public/private will finally be dissolved. But before this is possible, the minimum action of unitary urbanism is to extend the terrain of play to all desirable constructions. This terrain will be at the level of complexity of an old city.

Today, most work is knowledge work, and knowledge workers are not "finished" after 40 years on the job, they are merely bored.

There are three ways to develop a second career. The first is to actually start one. The second is to develop a parallel career. Finally, there are the social entrepreneurs.

There is one prerequisite for managing the second half of your life: You must begin long before you enter it. If one does not begin to volunteer before one is 40 or so, one will not volunteer once past 60.

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

For life is an expression, our unconscious actions the constant betrayal of our innermost thought. Confucius said that "man hideth not." Perhaps we reveal ourselves too much in small things because we have so little of the great to conceal.

People who force nature force themselves. When we grow only wheat, we become dough. If we seek only money, we become brass; and if we stay in the childhood of team sports, we become a stuffed leather ball.

To become a complete person, we must travel many paths, and to truly own anything, we must first of all give it away.

A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world.

Even if you were to live for three thousand years or ten times as long, you should still remember this, that no one loses any life other than the one that he is living, nor does he live any life other than the one that he loses, so the shortest life and the longest amount to the same.

Some day, will you be satisfied and want for nothing, yearning for nothing, and desiring nothing, animate or inanimate, to cater to your pleasures?

In our lives, this quality without a name is the most precious thing we ever have.

And I am free to the extent I have this quality in me.

If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again.

Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, having a drink at a friend’s house, driving on the freeway, going to bed again. There are a few more.

There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen.

When I see how few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.

The most fundamental splits in contemporary life occur because of the break-up of the old unity of design, production and enjoyment.