I am writing this as a follow-up to my last post, “What Is Your COVID-19 Story?” At the end of that post, as with many of my posts, I advocated a more mindful approach to the pandemic, culminating in ...

One of the core things that makes us human is our quest to understand our identity—who we are. Try to describe the things that make up who you are and what you love to do. For fun, I will do that now: ...

Fancy words go in and out of fashion, positing an existential temptation to overuse. The late 1990s gave us “literally.” People literally used “literally” to emphasize almost any point — even one that ...

Interdisciplinary efforts, for all their ostensible appeal, are more often praised than practiced, especially when it comes to combining the humanities and sciences. Nonetheless, connecting two ...

I am all alone, not in a despairing existentialist place, though sometimes I go there. No, I am all alone in the intersection of circles in a Venn diagram. The first circle represents the set of ...

Existential dread can manifest in many forms. This kind of intense trauma and stress generally comes from a major existential crisis. Existential dread can be scary, because it may feel like life ...

Psychologists from Sigmund Freud forward have generally agreed: our core attitudes about life are largely locked in by age five or so. Changing those attitudes requires intense effort. Neil Howe and ...

The image of the existentialist as a cafe-dwelling, chain-smoking, beret-wearing intellectual type comes largely from Sartre (Getty) Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) is the philosopher whose work – ...