If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.
“We like the idea that there's always someone responsible for any given event, because it helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there's someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone's control.”
― Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom
― Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom
“There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic. Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule.”
― What's Expected of Us
― What's Expected of Us
“People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn. But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film. ·”
― The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling
― The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling
“None of us are saints, but we can all try to be better. Each time you do something generous, you're shaping yourself into someone who's more likely to be generous next time, and that matters.”
― Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom
― Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom
“people in long-term relationships tend to lose their curiosity for each other. Not necessarily in an unkind way; they just become convinced they know each other better than they do. They don’t listen because they think they already know what the other person will say.”
― You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters
― You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters
Jayadev’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jayadev’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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