The independent news organization of Duke University
If your unhealthy coping mechanisms are turned inwards—if you suffer those quietly, too—you’re a bona-fide ‘healthy person’ in most people's eyes.
In the pursuit of academic, professional, aesthetic validation, we abuse our minds and our bodies through overwork.
That is the truly horrific thing about pessimism towards humanity: it perpetuates itself.
We might be better off fixing the conditions which made someone break the rules, rather than wasting energy punishing them for it.
Something tells me that I could work every day of the year, and be happy about it, if we stopped treating productivity like a lifestyle which we adopt for the weekday.
This is the general pattern of the column: the author will throw a weak rhetorical punch before running away. In the end, all we come away with is knowledge of the things he dislikes—a boring read made confusing by its lack of purposeful moves.
What we need to realize, collectively, is that nobody who is genuinely interested in your perspective is going to challenge you to a debate. If they wanted to understand you, they’d ask you to explain your beliefs—they would have a discussion.
Developing some ethical code, and a willingness to engage with the context of a moral dilemma, are the best way to resolve contradictions when we face them.
The best essays become proverbs because both are the product of a clear mind.
If we continue to pretend that these parties define the spectrum of political thought, we’ll have to get used to mental gymnastics. There will be nothing principled or consistent coming down the pipeline.
This is the general pattern of the column: the author will throw a weak rhetorical punch before running away. In the end, all we come away with is knowledge of the things he dislikes—a boring read made confusing by its lack of purposeful moves.
