Kierstin

“Aurelius says that one reason it doesn't matter how long you live is that this is not theatre, that the whole is not the thing. Each moment is the thing. "The soul obtains its own end, wherever the limit of life may be fixed. Not as...in a play...where the whole action is incomplete if anything cuts it short; but in every part and wherever it be stopped, it makes what has been set before it full and complete, so that it can say, 'I have what is my own.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong

“Why do people report themselves to be as happy as they were back when we all had less? Well, for one thing, we are comparing two societies that are both majestically wealthy in comparison to almost all societies throughout history. Neither the surveyed Americans of the 1950s nor those of the 2000s were struggling with endemic distress- hunger, pain, humiliation. And average people who are not in such distress are statistically more likely to call themselves happy than not.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong

“Though you work like mad to keep parts of you undiscovered, it is horrible to imagine that you will be completely successful. As the psychologist D.W. Winnicott wrote, "It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong

“Yet one of the most important things we have to learn is how to cope with abundance and with our hunger for yet more abundance”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht