‘Follow Your Passion’ Is Actually Good Advice (Sort of)
Here are five recent research findings worth considering when weighing the wisdom of “follow your passion” or pursuing a calling in life.
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Ideas
Anxiety Due to Absence of Exposure to Real Danger
To better understand how anxiety works in us, we have to see fear in the context where it evolved—with hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago.
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Engaging in Civil Arguments Is Effective Against Extremism
Philosophers are exemplars in disagreeing vehemently but civilly with others. Like them, using these 4 principles can help us have arguments that are effective against extremism.
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Christmas Truce: Raising Our White Flags with ‘Joyeux Noël’
The Christmas Truce of 1914 was the final happy memory some soldiers would have. Today, in our polarized culture, ‘Joyeux Noël’ reminds us to soften our social and political barriers.
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Stereotypes Are Like Sediment
It’s said that our actions are based on immediate intuitions, informed by accumulated stereotypes. Are we merely puppets of inherited ideologies?
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Ishiguro Explores ‘Our Illusory Sense of Connection with the World’
Ishiguro has been praised for his unapologetic investigation of loss and hope, and the “inevitable sadness” inherent in his novels.
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Kierkegaard, Knausgaard, and the ‘Kingdom of God’
Karl Ove Knausgaard often uses religious language in his fiction—but as religion recedes, does he think literature can create ecstatic experience?
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What is the Sublime? (According to Kant and Schopenhauer)
For Kant and Schopenhauer, scientific understanding deepens our experience with the Sublime, elevating our spiritual strength.
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Jung and Freud Feud: Is it Sex or the Collective Unconscious?
Once resembling the relationship between a devoted father and an admiring son, Freud and Jung split over the question of culture’s origins.
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Psychological Studies Overlook 85 Percent of People on Earth
We can’t make claims about human nature when studies only represent a narrow slice of humanity: mostly college students, middle-class respondents living near universities, and highly educated residents of wealthy, industrialized and democratic nations.
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You’re Unhappy Because You Focus on What You Can’t Control
If you succeed in shifting your goals internally, you’ll be happier, because what other people do is largely beyond your control.
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Virtual Reality Is Not an Empathy Machine
Virtual reality can help us better understand the experiences of others but we should remain skeptical whether it can create true empathy.
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