A unique reading group, started by a PhD holder in psychology and YouTuber, breaks the mold of typical book clubs. This post describes the group’s laid-back approach to discussing a wide range of texts, emphasizing open dialogue, philosophical pluralism, connection to everyday life, and personal perspectives. Find out what makes these discussions so engaging, and get a sneak peek at their future plans.
Only in the past few years have I started to accept that each person is a blend of many things, rather than being a consistent, unified whole. It took me a couple of decades, as a student of psychology and as a person living among other people, to grasp this basic fact about human beings and to let go of a naive expectation to see total uniformity in personalities. Now, I can appreciate the “good”…
Self-help is a tricky subject. Depending on the audience, it can provoke intense sympathy and intense skepticism. A dismissive attitude toward the current self-help culture can point to the lack of substance and depth in the popular material, the deceitful and self-serving “gurus,” the hyper-optimism of followers, the fixation with “positive thinking,” the unrealistic promises, the individualistic bias, and the social-political blindspots. But should the self-help culture–with all its associated ideas and aspirations–be completely dismissed?…
Connecting to your past, to your history, to your language, to your family, should not be done only for its own sake, or–even worse–for the sake of acquiring the comfort for being with the in-group. Connecting to your history shapes your presence, sharpens it, makes it truthful. That is the justification for pursuing the connections, analogous to why we ought to read history–not for the sake of the past, but for the sake of the…
What I wrote previously about my relationship with Toronto during 2010-2015, and the subsequent deepening of that relationship during the following six years while away from the city, and my eventual return last year, places the burden of agency exclusively on me. After I finished writing, a different way of looking at those years and the relationship occurred to me. A way of looking that recognizes an agency that is external to me. What if,…