Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

recognizes limits and constraints, boundaries that we cannot transgress and that create the frame that gives meaning to our lives. Moreover, it stands back from the goals of the “I,” is prepared to renounce its purposes, however precious, for the sake of the long-term benefits of love and friendship. It takes a negotiating posture towards the other

That is, we analyze how what is currently thought has its roots in prior thought, but also how thoughts of yesteryear hold underappreciated resources for thinking things differently today.

Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and the future gives us a correspondingly dim sense of the present. In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable. Under these circumstances we feel in conflict with our own bod

In his 2022 book, What We Owe the Future, philosopher William MacAskill introduces the phenomenon of “early plasticity, later rigidity.” During and immediately following periods of rapid change, there is a brief window to participate in the creation of a new normal. Over time, however, that window closes, and things calcify and become rigid again.