A sea change in human self-definition was taking place but its significance was beyond those who longed only for things to stay as they were. Instead of trying to understand what was happening and why, they chose to see the social chaos as criminal and to look for the villain on whom to lay the blame. Ah, they had one. It was the incredible, unheard of, never-before-seen selfishness—that is, the self-love—of this generation of reckless, childish people playing at revolution, refusing to grow up and assume its ordained responsibilities. There was your culprit!

Another flip side of narcissism. Vivian Gornick on narcissism’s bad rap, who’s to blame, and the benefits of a little self-love:In Defense of Narcissism

But so much of what used to remain private has become public. And how does that change its purpose? I spent an afternoon on Instagram, looking through selfies. What I saw was a familiar pole dance—women posting hot pictures, men drooling in the comments section. Ur hot. Ur gorgeous. (If nothing else, looking at selfies will leave you despondent over the state of the apostrophe.) And herein lies the magic of selfies: They are an insanely effective delivery system for ego gratification.

Sara Hepolah offers this brilliant and refreshing meditation on the narcissism of selfies and the oft-neglected flip side of that same coin:A Good Angle Is Hard to Find

In the theater on the other hand the flesh-and-blood presence of the actors, good or bad as they may be, creates a sense of reality and immediacy, a heightened state of attention. Having paid for your seat, having promised yourself a special evening, and finding yourself sitting in the middle of a long row beside others who have also paid and promised themselves a special evening, others whom you imagine have similar interests to your own, people willing to spend time and money supporting avant-garde culture, a community almost—in these circumstances you are probably always going to hang on at least thirty minutes, however bewildered and sceptical you may be. And thirty minutes should be enough for Beckett’s enchantments to begin to work. Simply the emotional experience of being in the theater, the sense of occasion, the positive atmosphere of people engaging in an intellectual pursuit together, provides the necessary momentum for tackling the great enigma of Beckett’s work.

Tim Parks on the experimental nature of theater and the thrill of leaving behind an awful show: Six Chairs in Search of an Audience

Making and recognizing progress not only builds up intrinsic motivation, it prevents you from slipping into the hollowness of automatic, forgettable routines. When you think about how you first started out with a skill or working towards a goal like getting fit or learning how to do your job well, it seems like forever ago because you’ve made a lot of progress. There are lots of relevant and remarkable milestones, all along the way.

Beautiful meditation on the iDoneThis blog about the science behind making the most of your time. (via wonderisms)

I won’t ever be able entirely to understand my own work or even my own motivations. It is first of all a gift, but the direction it has taken has been because of the Church in me or the effect of the Church’s teaching, not because of a personal perception or love of God. For you to think this would be possible because of your ignorance of me; for me to think it would be sinful in a high degree. I am not a mystic and I do not lead a holy life. Not that I can claim any interesting or pleasurable sins (my sense of the devil is strong) but I know all about the garden variety, pride, gluttony, envy and sloth, and what is more to the point, my virtues are as timid as my vices. I think sin occasionally brings one closer to God, but not habitual sin and not this petty kind that blocks every small good. A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.

I disagree with O’Connor on many, many points, but that doesn’t stop me from admiring the way she approaches her thoughts on God, the Church, and belief itself. She has a self-awareness about her that makes me wish I could sit down with her and have a chat about all the things we disagree over.Writing for the Godless: Flannery O’Connor on Dogma, Belief, and the Difference Between Religion and Faith

Back when I could not bear pictures of myself, I used to take artsy photos of buildings, of my feet in exotic locations, to show people where I’d been. Is it really less self-involved to take 100 photos of your dog, or your new baby, or your latest meal? Vanity isn’t simply the impulse to turn a camera on yourself. It can be the very intense impulse to get out of the frame.

A Good Angle Is Hard to Find - The Morning News

Walking can provoke these excesses: surfeits of fatigue that make the mind wander, abundances of beauty that turn the soul over, excesses of drunkenness on the peaks, the high passes (where the body explodes). Walking ends by awakening this rebellious, archaic part of us: our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired. Because walking puts us on the vertical axis of life: swept along by the torrent that rushes just beneath us.

A Philosophy of Walking: Thoreau, Nietzsche and Kant on Walking

The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.

This Is Your Brain on Great Literature

All of which prompts a question: Is my dream of a collaborative reading experience merely that, a dream? On the many occasions when I tried to set up a shared Subtext or Readmill reading with a friend, we always ran into endless snags, from an inability to settle on a book we both found appetizing to scheduling and pacing incompatibilities like the ones I had with Liz. Apparently, and despite the ongoing popularity of book groups, we weren’t alone in being flummoxed by the logistics of reading the same book together. After all, if there were a robust demand for a complexly shared reading app, wouldn’t Subtext and Readmill have found more users?

Is reading antisocial?

Thinking without hope might sound rather bleak, but it needn’t be so. I see it rather as embracing an affirmative, even cheerful, realism. Nietzsche admired Epictetus, the former slave turned philosophy teacher, for living without hope. “Yes,” Nietzsche said, “he can smile.” We can, too.

Abandon (Nearly) All Hope

Kleos lay very near the core of the Greek value system. Their value system was at least partly motivated, as perhaps all value systems are partly motivated, by the human need to feel as if our lives matter. A little perspective, which the Greeks certainly had, reveals what brief and feeble things our lives are. As the old Jewish joke has it, the food here is terrible — and such small portions! What can we do to give our lives a moreness that will help withstand the eons of time that will soon cover us over, blotting out the fact that we ever existed at all? Really, why did we bother to show up for our existence in the first place? The Greek speakers were as obsessed with this question as we are.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, thinking about what Plato would Tweet.

If depression is a foul miasma wreathing the brain, elegant sadness is more like a peacock’s tail, coloured in blue-gentian and rich marine greens

Adam Roberts makes the case that I’ve long espoused- that sadness can be one of life’s most profoundly great things. Beautiful, necessary read.The mysterious beauty of sadness

Or does it? The question that Goldstein’s book sets out to consider is what we mean by progress, and also what we mean by meaning. Her goal is to do more than prove how relevant philosophy still is. She aims to reveal how many of our most pressing questions simply aren’t better answered elsewhere. Much of what we take for progress delivers answers that miss the point, distort issues, ignore complications, and may be generated by badly formulated questions in the first place. Goldstein also wants to show us that figuring out how to live a meaningful life is something very different from understanding the meaning of special relativity or evolution. We are deluged with information; we know how to track down facts in seconds; the scientific method produces new discoveries every day. But what does all that mean for us? As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed:

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book, Plato at the Googleplex, is without a doubt my next read.Playing With Plato

In the United States, research psychologists have shown that narcissism rates, as measured by a standard academic tool known as the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, rose rapidly from the later 1980s, which would appear to track the increases in inequality. The data all point to the fact that as larger differences in material circumstances create greater social distances, feelings of superiority and inferiority increase. In short, growing inequality makes us all more neurotic about “image management” and how we are seen by others.

Inequality has been an abstract political debate for awhile now, but it has real consequences on us as individuals, too.How Inequality Hollows Out the Soul

1. Hiding Your Flaws People fall in love with each other’s rough edges. Paradoxically, it’s our flaws and vulnerabilities that make us unique and endearing towards others. The more we’re willing to reveal where we come up short, the more intimacy and connection we’ll generate in our personal lives, and the happier and healthier we’ll be in the long run.

Mark Manson (one of my favorite writers) lays out 12 things people care too much about. Making the cut: sexual jealousy, politics, being offended. Couldn’t agree more. 12 Stupid Things People Care Way Too Much About - The Good Men Project

Balls and similar gatherings are wont to attract all that is bad and vicious; all the quarrels, envyings, slanders, and indiscreet tendencies of a place will be found collected in the ballroom. While people’s bodily pores are opened by the exercise of dancing, the heart’s pores will be also opened by excitement … while you were dancing, souls were groaning in hell by reason of sins committed when similarly occupied, or in consequence thereof.

I’m not sure I like the patron saint of writers. In Dan Piepenbring’s words, “Buzzkill, Francis!”. Paris Review – The Patron Saint of Writers and Journalists.

Out of all the possible amounts of dark energy that our universe might have, the actual amount lies in the tiny sliver of the range that allows life. There is little argument on this point. It does not depend on assumptions about whether we need liquid water for life or oxygen or particular biochemistries. It depends only on the requirement of atoms. As before, one is compelled to ask the question: Why does such fine-tuning occur? And the answer many physicists now believe: the multiverse. A vast number of universes may exist, with many different values of the amount of dark energy. Our particular universe is one of the universes with a small value, permitting the emergence of life. We are here, so our universe must be such a universe. We are an accident. From the cosmic lottery hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life. But then again, if we had not drawn such a ticket, we would not be here to ponder the odds.

In light of the recent discovery of gravitational waves that all but prove the Big Bang, and get us closer toward the multiverse, this is all the more appropriate. I’ve always thought we pay too little attention to the mind-boggling implications of the multiverse, which is starting to look (at least to physicists) more and more like reality.

We Are a Cosmic Accident: Alan Lightman on Dark Energy, the Multiverse, and Why We Exist | Brain Pickings

1. “The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.”

Teddy Roosevelt dispenses advice on reading. I find some of these, especially #4, especially refreshing. I spend so much time trying to figure out what I should read, what would make me better, that sometimes I forget to just read what I want to read.

Teddy Roosevelt’s 10 Rules for Reading

The divergent Greek and Hebrew approaches went into the mix that is Western culture, often clashing but sometimes also tempering one another. Over the centuries, philosophy, perhaps aided by religion, learned to abandon entirely the flawed Greek presumption that only extraordinary lives matter. This was progress of the philosophical variety, subtler than the dazzling triumphs of science, but nevertheless real. Philosophy has laboriously put forth arguments that have ever widened the sphere of mattering. It was natural for the Greeks to exclude their women and slaves, not to mention non-Greeks, whom they dubbed barbarians. Such exclusions are unthinkable to us now. Being inertial creatures, we required rigorous and oft-repeated arguments that spearheaded social movements that resulted, at long last, in the once quixotic declaration of human rights. We’ve come a long way from the kleos of Greeks, with its unexamined presumption that mattering is inequitably distributed among us, with the multireplicated among us mattering more.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex, on the human need to make ourselves heard, and how that need explains the popularity of Twitter: What Would Plato Tweet?

The net is the Promethean substance of this age. It can consume, it can destroy, and it can empower. Like fire, we have to learn to use it and live with it.

Quinn Norton offers some exquisite wisdom on what she’s learned about living on the web: Twitter I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down