Sublime

Ethan Kross, a psychologist and the director of the University of Michigan Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory, says,

“We’re constantly trying to make meaning out of our experiences, and our mind is flexibly constructed to help us do so.”

Or do such Sisyphean philosophies—that “the road is life”—turn out to be bourgeois luxuries indulged by those safe enough to pretend this is all there is? Does the hunger and hope of the migrant show us something more fundamentally human? Maybe our craving for rest, refuge, arrival, home is a hunger that can’t be edited—the heart an obstinate palim

Existential ideas and attitudes have embedded themselves so deeply into modern culture that we hardly think of them as existentialist at all. People (at least in relatively prosperous countries where more urgent needs don’t intervene) talk about anxiety, dishonesty and the fear of commitment. They worry about being in bad faith, even if they don’t

Don’t worry, be happy. As modern people we have chosen Montaigne over Augustine. We traded pious self-cultivation for undemanding self-esteem. But is love of self really enough to be happy? You know the answer to that, dear reader. And so did Augustine.

You are what you love because you live toward what you want.

“It is useless to go looking for goodness and happiness far away,” he concludes. They’re closer than you think.

But when it comes to discerning with wisdom, we must honestly confront the question: How do we know what we need to know in order to live a flourishing life?

As the Yale psychologist Marc Brackett puts it, “Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others.” This subjective layer is what we want to focus on in our quest to know other people. The crucial question is not “What happened to this person?” or “What are the items on their rés