“You probably didn’t start hating yourself out of nowhere. One possibility is that your self-hatred may be a natural reaction to a traumatic event… Begin to slowly, carefully, put down the weight of your imperfect explanation… The fact that it was not enough does not mean anything about you—it just means you are human, with all the strengths and weaknesses involved.”
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
“Hatred has to be learned, Golden says: ‘We are all born with the capacity for aggression as well as compassion. Which tendencies we embrace requires mindful choice by individuals, families, communities and our culture in general. The key to overcoming hate is education: at home, in schools, and in the community.’ According to Dutchevici, facing the fear of being vulnerable and utterly human is what allows us to connect, to feel, and ultimately, to love. She suggests creating ‘cracks in the system.’ These cracks can be as simple as connecting to your neighbor, talking with a friend, starting a protest, or even going to therapy and connecting with an ‘Other.’ It is through these acts that one can understand hate and love.”
“But with the advent of social media, says Ethan Kross, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who studies the impact of Facebook on our wellbeing, ‘envy is being taken to an extreme’. We are constantly bombarded by ‘Photoshopped lives’, he says, ‘and that exerts a toll on us the likes of which we have never experienced in the history of our species. And it is not particularly pleasant.’”
“Traditional headline economic indicators like GDP and unemployment tell us the economy is thriving, but they don’t reflect the lived reality of most Americans,” Ludwig said in a statement. “Americans are working harder than ever, fueling our economic growth, but the benefits of that hard work are not being distributed in a way that supports upward mobility for too many middle- and low-income Americans.”
“In a recent Ditch the Label study, we spoke to 7,347 people about bullying. We asked respondents to define bullying and then later asked if, based on their own definition, they had ever bullied anybody. 14% of our overall sample, so that’s 1,239 people, said yes. What we then did was something that had never been done on this scale before; we asked them intimate questions about their lives, exploring things like stress and trauma, home lives, relationships and how they feel about themselves.”
