When we first moved to the place I would come to call home, a boy, five years my senior, knocked on the door to meet his new playmate. He introduced himself, spelled his last name, and every weekend and summer we played: Sometimes in the woods pretending we were soldiers…
Something curious happens when we track satisfaction over the course of our lives. Couples meet, fall in love, get married and life could not be more wonderful. Then they have children and satisfaction falls. It plummets. Happiness only begins its rise once again after the little ones are hatched and…
In many ways this is the greatest period of history. Yet ours is a culture of longing. The world is of course the world, and it is filled with tragedy, hardship, pain, loss and indiscretion. Yet life expectancy and literacy rates have been steadily rising for decades. We are richer…
Thoughts of peer pressure bring a parent’s worst fears to mind: sex; drugs; uncategorized acts of stupidity; the fact that our kids cannot be who they are when they are the most themselves. When they get home at night, there is no escape from the peacocking of peers on Instagram…
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus retells the ancient Greek tale of the king Sisyphus who was condemned to forever push a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again. Despite an eternity of “futile labor”, in the end Camus concludes “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” …