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Channel: The Marginalian
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Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life

“To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task.” “I mean to...

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The Vampire Problem: The Paradoxical Psychology of Why It Is So Hard to Change

“Many of [life’s] big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself.” To be human is to suffer from a peculiar...

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How to Hold the Darkness: Notes on Living Through Uncertainty

There are times in life when the continent of certainty parts underfoot and, as the ash cloud of the old world rains darkness upon us, we are asked to swim in the rivers of lava that will make the new....

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The Science of Waiting and the Art of Delay

Exploring the intersection of time and decision-making to shine a light on what it means to be human. “We never live; we are always in the expectation of living,” Voltaire famously lamented. This...

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The Unspeakable World: Alan Watts on How to Touch the Pulse of Life

What makes life so disorienting is that its greatest revelations and greatest transformations are inarticulable. William James knew this when he listed ineffability as the first of the four features of...

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How to Change Your Life

HOW TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE by Maria Popova Don’t try to wash your tired hands clean from the bloodshed of your private wars. Just unclench the fist that has come to feel like home and let the story slip...

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How to Break Free from the Tyranny of Certainty: The Japanese Concept of “Ma”

“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,'” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But despite all we know about the...

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The True Purpose of Tarot

“Nothing like this has ever happened before or will ever happen again,” a friend said to me about a lucky turn of events — a statement that struck me as touchingly self-negating: a recognition that...

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Steinbeck and the Difficult Art of the Friend Breakup

“I can’t consider you a friend when out of every contact there comes some intentionally wounding thing.” “A friend,” wrote the poet and philosopher John O’Donohue in his beautiful meditation on the...

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Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativitiy

Once, at the gym with a physicist friend, I was struck by how no one else in the room had any idea that while she was sweating on the treadmill with a blank stare into space, she was doing advanced...

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The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to...

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” “No one can build you...

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Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die

The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get...

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Against the Cartesian Myth of Work/Life Balance: André Gregory’s...

Half a millennium into our recovery from the civilizational wound Descartes inflicted by severing the body and the mind, we are bleeding with a Cartesian cleft of our own making — the damaging divide...

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The Stoic Key to Living with Presence: Seneca on Time Spent vs. Saved vs. Wasted

“Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing… is ours, except time.” “How we spend our days is, of course, how...

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The Coziest Place on the Moon: Or, How to Bear Your Loneliness

On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter...

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On Losing a Parent

We spend our lives mastering the art of losing. Our necessary losses shape us; the unnecessary, senseless, devastating losses bend our shape to test our breaking point. We can lose people to life — to...

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Actuality vs. Possibility and How to Hear the Signal of Your Life

Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with the debris of a comet burning through the atmosphere against the backdrop of a billion...

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The Canon of Solitude: 200 Years of Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists on...

There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is...

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The Measure of a Life Well Lived: Henry Miller on How to Grow Old and the...

“If you can fall in love again and again… if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.” “On how one orients himself to...

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How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking

We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them. Nothing betrays our partitions...

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