Status Updates From The Antidote

Society itself is essentially a "codified hero system" - a structure of customs, traditions and laws that we have designed to help us feel part of something bigger, and longer lasting, than a mere human life.

In Becker's view, all religions, all political movements and national identities, all business ventures, all charitable activity and all artistic pursuits are nothing but "immortality projects," desperate efforts to break free if deaths gravitational pull.

We are perfectly capable of feeling acute self-pity about more minor predicaments at home or at work on a daily basis. Yet the biggest predicament of all goes by, for the most part, not consciously worried about. At bottom, wrote Freud - sweepingly, as usual, but in this case persuasively - no one believes in his own death.

There is a greater correlation between perfectionism and suicide, research suggests, than between feelings of hopelessness and suicide.

"Zen transmits its legacy from this deeper place. It is a different kind of failure: the Great Failure, a boundless surrender. Nothing to hold on to, and nothing to lose." Natalie Goldberg

Calling a desire bad names doesn't get rid of it. - Watts