“...the most pervasive yet seductive delusion of our time: that we can find something ‘out there’—some person, some social stature, some ideological cause, some external validation—that will make our lives work for us. If this were true, we would see the proof all around us. Instead of widespread satisfaction, we see the frenzies of popular culture, the distraction of the idle, the rage of the dispossessed, and only rarely a person who moves through this life with a sense of transcendent purpose, deep psychic grounding, and a spiritually enlarged life.”
— James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
“Since it’s too painful to fantasize what will never come to pass—we drown ourselves in other people’s visions and are led mechanically to the end, see also politics, economics, love.”
— Edward Teach, Sadly, Porn
“He has learned to adapt to the world’s values rather than find his own. He expects, thereby, that life will continue to flow evenly and pleasantly.”
— James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
“Would you be willing to live this past year again and again for all eternity?”
— Irvin Yalom, Staring at the Sun
“Contemplation over time.”
— Verda Delp
“I was not leaving the South to forget the South but so that someday I might understand it.”
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
“...with so-co individualism being all the rage in the age of Know Thyself you’re not going to want to hear about how little of you is you rather than the work product of whatever media agency targets the demo they’ve decided you’re in. You’re not taught what to want, but how to want, the modern innovation is to let you think you came up with you on your own.”
— Edward Teach, Sadly, Porn
“He alone feels authentic sorrow who realizes not only what he is, but that he is.”
— Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing
“This intellectual vanity is the constitutive element of the midwit, because what he enjoys is the appearance and the practice of intellectualism. What he lacks is actual discernment, which requires intellectual development and rigor. So he googles which books to read and has his mind blown at twenty-four by The Count of Monte Cristo and The Alchemist, but more likely, his bookshelf is full of titles about mindsets, egos, and habits. He takes his mind very seriously.”
— Daniel Cult, Toward a Theory of the Midwit
“Sometimes the thing that really needs to change is the idea that you need to change.”
— Christine D'Ercole
“Why do I have to work hard? Like, why is that good?”
— Jessica Sele
“Less striving, more being.”
— Denis Morton
“What would happen to the depression statistics if people were less worried about paying for healthcare, for college, for retirement? Or if we weren’t left to our own devices to figure out how to work and take care of our families and have a little time left over to actually enjoy ourselves and one another? Or if we weren’t constantly being reminded by advertisers of all the ways we fall short of achieving the good life? Or if we felt that we had some influence with our legislators, our president, our financiers, or anyone else who exerts power over what we care about?”
— Gary Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression
“Nowhere are we encouraged to be satisfied with what we have.”
— Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity
“The DSM is an unparalleled literary achievement. It renders the varieties of our psycho-spiritual suffering without any comment on where it comes from, what it means, or what ought to be done about it. It reads as if its authors were standing on Mars, observing our discontents through a telescope.”
— Gary Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression
“There’s a lot of reasons people feel the way they do.”
— Justin Jackson
“No one is free from addictions, for addictions are anxiety management techniques the purpose of which is to lower the level of psychic distress we feel at any given moment, whether we are conscious of the distress or not. In no person’s life are these anxiety reduction patterns absent. For one person, stress is relieved by a cigarette. For another, food. For another, a phone call to a friend. For another, work. For another, some simple, repetitive activity, such as cleaning the house. For another, compulsive prayer. What all these disparate acts have in common is that they are treating existential anxiety, whether consciously or not—that they have a compulsive character, which means that they have life outside our conscious control or awareness and that at best they offer only partial soothing of the stress. If we did not find some relief as a result of the behavior, we would move to one where we did. But such relief is at best momentary. Then, the anxiety rises again and the palliative behavior must be enacted again and therein lies the addictive hook.”
— James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
“Not every day is gonna be your best day.”
— Denis Morton
“In order to become whole, we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth—a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If we choose instead to content ourselves with intellectual ‘wisdom,’ we will remain in the sphere of illusion and self-deception.”
— Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child
“A reckoning with burnout is so often a reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with—the things you fill your life with—feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live and the sort of meaning you want to make of it. That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self and from desire. If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate? Do you know what you like and don’t like when there’s no one there to watch and no exhaustion to force you to choose the path of least resistance? Do you know how to move without always moving forward?”
— Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even
“Think poetry rather than prose.”
— Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity
“When people say they want to lose weight or need to eat better or whatever, what they’re actually after is a feeling. They want to feel something about themselves. What they’re actually saying is, ‘I want to feel stronger.’”
— Casey Johnston
“Objectivity is the ideology of the status quo.”
— Ramona Martinez
“‘Skills’ are actions stripped of their context.”
— Farhad Dalal, The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami
“Asking a lot of questions is the sign of an inexperienced therapist. Questions are the therapist’s need to feel in control.”
— Jonathan Shedler
“The most important part of any therapy is the relationship between the patient and the therapist. This interaction forms the foundation for trust, object constancy, and emotional intimacy.”
— Jerold Kreisman/Hal Strauss, I Hate You Don't Leave Me
“It’s a thing that can happen when you’ve been in therapy long enough – that, like, [you’ve] got the thumbnail sketch of [your] whole shit and [you] can just be like, this is my diagnosis, here’s the assorted traumas that are associated with it, and here’s some other unenumerated issues that I have…. And you can do all that in ninety seconds because you’ve been hearing yourself say the same shit. And you’ve been told this by authority figures before. And yet that’s not the same thing as insight: It’s the opposite of insight because you’ve basically, at some point, you’ve just learned your lines. And you know what you’re supposed to be doing. And then you’re just like, ‘well, if I do this enough times, then I won’t have this diagnosis anymore.’”
— David J. Roth
“Most needs are just other people’s expectations.”
— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs
“To say that a particular form of suffering is a disease is always to go beyond the observation that the suffering exists. It is also to say that the suffering doesn’t belong in our world—that we would live better lives without it and that we ought to do so. When doctors turn suffering into symptom, symptom into disease, and disease into a condition to be cured, they are acting not only as scientists but also as moral philosophers. To claim that an affliction ought to be eradicated is also to claim that it is inimical to the life we ought to be leading.”
— Gary Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression
“Sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy.”
— Old Joy (Reichardt, 2006)
“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
“Don’t focus on where you fell. Focus on where you tripped.”
— Josh Cook
“When you call yourself an expert, you’ve stopped learning.”
— Tera Risenhoover
“Call your sorrow a disease. Or don’t. Take drugs. Or don’t. See a therapist. Or don’t. But whatever you do, when life drives you to your knees, which it is bound to do, which maybe it is meant to do, don’t settle for being ‘sick in the head.’ Remember, that’s just a story. You can tell your own story about your discontents. And my guess is that it will be better than the one that the depression doctors have manufactured.”
— Gary Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression
“The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety. The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.”