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When my wife and I joined our local food coop, the prospect of working a regular shift to unload trucks, pull produce, stock shelves and sweep floors galvanized me.  Because in a world of bullshit jobs where millions of smart, talented people are getting paid heaps of money to blow hot air about invisible products that nobody even pays attention to, there’s something deeply refreshing and about working in…

Part of me wishes that I did believe in astrology.  Because then I would finally have an existential scapegoat. Somewhere to point when life doesn’t turn out the way I want.  It just sounds so comforting.  Knowing that no matter how many rejections and disappointments and depressions and failures come my way, there will always be a magical external force over which I have no control that will justify them all….

Woody once said that whenever he started to write his films that in his bedroom, he would think they were going to be the greatest things ever made.  But then, once production was a go, he would start backing up the dump truck of compromise. And by the end, when the movie was about to be released, he would hope and pray that he wasn’t massively humiliated.  Because you can’t…

When we begin experiencing an emotional crisis, we rarely have the time or temperament to figure out what to do with our feelings.  The moment is too overwhelming for rational thought.  And so, unless we have a solid plan in place, we resort to unhealthy ways of coping. We make things worse by falling back on old behaviors that we used in the past.  Like eating an entire box…

Carlin believed that a sense of humor was a sense, an understanding and a feeling for what didn’t fit, for the incongruous, for that which was out of place or in the wrong scale.  What a beautiful way to comprehend the world. Laughing our way to clarity and wisdom.  The challenge, though, is making sure there isn’t an emotional casualty in the process.  Because when we resort to humor as the…

Happiness is a mental habit.  Of course, so is depression. Both of these emotional states result from our lifelong practices and sequences and patterns of conscious thought.  What’s encouraging, though, is that we don’t have to remain biological slaves to our routines. Cognitive behavioral psychology research indicates that any conditioned habit the human brain has learned, can also be unlearned. Even if we’re predisposed to a particular behavior, we can still…

Seinfeld was presented an award for his outstanding achievements in comedy.  Naturally, his acceptance speech was about why all awards are stupid.  Your whole career as a comedian, he said, is about making fun of pretentious, high minded, self congratulatory, bullshit events just like this one. I really don’t want to be up here. But we feel the need to set aside a night to give out these jack…

Focus is just another word for don’t innovate.  It’s a mandate perpetuated by the powers that be to help keep people in their lanes. To curb originality. To assure that individuals remain small, scared and dreamless in their endeavors.  Because god forbid anyone should expand their sense of possibility, try something new and show the world that they’re capable of acting in new ways. That might make them hard to…

Since a very young age, teachers and parents and other authority figures have warned us never to answer a question with a question.  That’s an avoidance tactic for dishonest people who are scared of addressing the issue at hand.  But once we stumble into adulthood, we quickly realize that life is rarely that black and white. Each human being rests at the nexus of a vast number of interwoven…

Compassion is, at its core, at act of imagination.  It’s the ability to think otherwise. The willingness to step back from our own experience and expose ourselves to the complete possibility of what might be.  This principle transformed my ability to connect with other people. It’s simply a matter of training yourself to view interaction as an exercise in creativity. A spontaneous game of improv theater that gives you…