From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Mental wellness is an unwavering commitment to reality, regardless of the cost. Trauma, in this light, can be a powerful teacher, offering a stark glimpse of reality, a contrast to the daily bombardment of trivial concerns.
If our future is to count as a utopia, we cannot allow a massive oppressed class of hyper-sentient, uncomfortable digital beings. We want it to be good for all kinds of minds.
When people talk about getting there… there's no there to get to. The problem is the eternal search for there. There is no there, you are searching for something that doesn't exist.
The question to be asked is why doesn't everybody fly?
The people in the advanced countries now face a choice: we can express justified horror, or we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes. If we refuse to do the latter, we will be contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.
Wealth is just an indicator of how well (or not) things are going. Whatever I'm doing, there are indicators… do people like what I'm doing? Do they think I'm crazy? Am I making a lot of money? These are just indicators. Wealth is not and end in itself, it's just one of many indicator as to how you're doing.
Some of my greatest rewards have been when I jumped off the cliff and figured out how to fly on the way down.
For thousands of years, the religions, movements and philosophers of the various iterations of 'us' have espoused mindfulness as being an essential life-skill, bringing us from wherever we may be to the here and now- where we are at our most alive.
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilisation.
I owned a US$500 million hedge fund when I decided to retire from Wall Street. On paper, I was on top of the world. Inside, though, something was missing. All of the money and material things in the world could never fill that void. It was painful to admit, but I had climbed up to the top of the wrong mountain.
I am not a big fan of the word hope, I am a big fan of the word determination. Being determined is a moral position, when you are depend on the word hope you are lazy.
The experiences you have in dreams, measured by brain activity and glucose consumption, are remarkably similar to those you would have while awake. Whether you're running the London Marathon in reality or dreaming about it, your brain's electrical and metabolic patterns are nearly identical.