Amazon link Johann Hari was diagnosed with depression as a teenager, and was prescribed the antidepressant Paxil, because his doctor told him that depression was a disease of the brain, so his brain chemistry needed to be fixed. He stayed on antidepressants for 13 years, dealing with side effects like weight gain and sexual dysfunction, […]
Category: community
Radical Friendship, by Kate Johnson
Amazon link Radical Friendship book site I learned of this book from listening to this podcast episode where Layla Saad, author of Me and White Supremacy (which I found valuable and challenging), interviewed the author Kate Johnson about her new book. Johnson, a multiracial Buddhist practitioner and teacher, based the book around the Mitta Sutta, […]
Together, by Vivek Murthy
Amazon link In response to my newsletter talking about Radical Friendship, a friend suggested I read this book, subtitled “The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World”. Dr. Murthy became the Surgeon General of the United States in 2014, and was initially focused on all the usual health problems of heart disease, […]
Building a Community of Alignment
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead In my first post on alignment, I wrote “Alignment is the art and craft of creating or identifying a unifying purpose and a set of elements or parts, and then […]
Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, by Jacqueline Novogratz
Amazon link Book site and associated online course, which is free if you buy the book. “Whoever you are, and whatever you do, the world needs you to lead. There will be times when happiness may feel elusive and the horizon impossible to reach. But remember that each day, we wake up to another chance […]
What will you do?
Government of the people, by the people, for the people Those ringing words from Abraham Lincoln are inspiring me today. Things seems especially hopeless to me right now, with contributing factors including: The lack of justice in the Breonna Taylor case, where damaging the neighbor’s walls was considered to be a more serious crime than […]
Privilege and Self-Education
My heart hurts today, and I felt I had to write about what’s going on in America. Staying silent reinforces the current systemic inequities. Silence implies that the system we have is okay. And it is not okay. So I am sharing what little I know, and links for me and others in my position […]
Play to win, or play to include?
I’ve been thinking about different ways to approach situations in life. One is to play to win – look at the rules the way they are, and figure out how to exploit those rules to your advantage to the maximum extent possible. James Carse calls this playing the finite game. Examples include: Figuring out how […]
The Power of Onlyness, by Nilofer Merchant
Amazon link Official book site When I met Nilofer Merchant at a Seth Godin workshop several years ago, I was impressed by her presence and her clarity of thinking on the emerging social-network-based world. I finally got around to reading her latest book, The Power of Onlyness, where she makes the emphatic case that each […]
Find the Others
Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, […]
