Category: General Insights

At the heart of palliative care lies a simple, yet profound philosophy: it’s about comforting, not just curing. This branch of medicine focuses on alleviating suffering and improving the quality of life for those with serious, life-limiting illnesses. It's a compassionate approach, prioritising the patient's comfort and dignity over aggressive treatments. Within this compassionate framework, palliative care embraces a range of services. It might involve managing pain, addressing emotional and psychological distress, or providing spiritual support. The care is as unique as the individuals it serves, tailored to their needs, wishes, and personal values. Palliative care goes beyond addressing physical symptoms; it encompasses the emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of care. This might include counselling, therapy, or alternative therapies like meditation and relaxation techniques. This holistic approach ensures that every…

The value of deep introspection for one’s life is enormous. Learning to listen to your own instincts and have some degree of trust for them (obviously not going overboard) is extremely important for a rich life. You can’t have a fulfilling existence without it, unless you have attained some kind of enlightenment through the so-called ego illusion. But I’ve come to think that how we treat introspection as a culture and as a people says a lot about the state of our civilization, our culture, and our development. How we regard introspection (and self-understanding, self-trust, etc.) should be a very important question. Now that we’ve mostly agreed that human rights, rule of law, etc. are givens, we should hold the value of introspection much much higher.  And we should judge ourselves…

It seems people are more scared than ever to be misunderstood. At any minute you could be called a traitor or a bigot or any number of horribly damaging things.  It could mean the end of your career, people say. It feels critically important to manage our reputations and chase after the opinions of others. For our culture, this is almost a death sentence for virtues like spontaneity, originality, and authenticity.  No wonder comedians, the standard bearers of these virtues, are scared to perform on college campuses, where mob rule has become the norm in recent years. If we’re misunderstood, we get concerned that our reputation, what some call our most valuable asset, is ruined. But our reputation is something that ensues from our genuine and original actions.  If you adjust your actions…

Is there a crisis of meaning? You’ve heard the story – suicides, addiction, depression, tribalism.  Ben Shapiro said, “There is a god-shaped hole in the American heart and we are filling it with tribalism and partisanship and rage.”  Similarly, David Brooks is talking about the importance of community. But “god” and community are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for filling that hole.  Consider that American youth faced an enormously consequential “crisis of meaning” in the 50s and 60s, at a time when there was plenty of god and community – maybe too much. We’ve neglected some very simple, even common sense practices and principles that, in times of crisis like this, people have the opportunity to rediscover. One of the most egregious failures of our society is that young people generally aren’t expected to cultivate their…

“The lack of a balance of intellect and vision in our lives leads to the pursuit of doubtful cults of the supra-rational.”   – Theodore Roszak Humans require a balance of “intellect and vision”. We need to remain deeply grounded in reality with the help of reason and logic (intellect). And we need a belief system to direct us (vision). “Intellect” is pretty easy to define (which is itself highly consequential, as we shall see). “Vision” is more difficult to define.  The word “vision”, as Roszak uses it, really is just a symbol to represent something. But we all know what it is even if we have never heard it described clearly.  And don’t be fooled by the clowns managing your office when they put the word “vision” on powerpoint presentations.…