Category: philosophical counseling

• August 27, 2015

  Money Rules For Simple Living: A Very Brief Guide

  Money Cares You are someone for whom scarcity has loomed large. You may have accrued some debt over the years, some of it on your credit card, the rest used to pay for your college education. You may not have much money now, and you’re beginning to wonder whether struggling just to get by is…
• August 26, 2015

  Contest 2: Charging. Toughness Training

  I believe enduring something that threatens your life or what you care about is easier to do than charging into dangerous territory. This is why the first contest–the easiest–associated with learning toughness would withstanding. Will you withstand or will you cave in, give in? Now we come to the second contest: charging. And the question is:…
• August 21, 2015

  A Defense of Boasting

  We now have a very low estimation of boasters. They are loud-mouthed, arrogant, sometimes self-deceiving, and, while boasting especially, very inconsiderate of others. Such a level of self-importance disgusts us, the non-boasters. We have the presumption that those who are properly confident have no need to speak of themselves, let alone to sing their own…
• August 12, 2015

  5 Puzzles About Courage

  In preparation for a fall course I am teaching at Kaos Pilots entitled “Time to Get Tough,” I am reading William Ian Miller’s interesting book The Mystery of Courage. In the “Introduction,” Miller writes, “The core of courage’s ancient tale is attack and defense against the Other, other men to be exact. The core is about the…
• August 3, 2015

  William James on “The Moral Equivalent of War”

  William James, a committed pacifist, lived through the Civil War and the Spanish-American War and died during the run-up to World War I. In an incredible essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” first delivered as a talk at Stanford and later published in 1910, the year of his death, James observes that though everyone would…