Ancient Wisdom for a Modern World
I finished watching the most recent season of House of Cards this past weekend. For those of you who are not addicted to the Netflix series, it is a show about Congressman Frank Underwood’s brutal climb to the presidency. He and his wife will do literally anything, including murder, to reach the top. Their ambition
David Brooks latest op-ed, titled “How to Leave a Mark on People,” brought up a question that I explored during my Judaism month: what makes a strong institution? An old friend of Brooks’ recently died and Brooks describes Joe as “a community-building guy — serving his town, organizing events like fishing derbies for bevies of kids, radiating
Our brains like to make stories that make our experiences coherent. For example, if you graduate college and get a job at a reputable company, your brain might lump you into the “young professional” bucket and the extent to which you are psychologically content will be determined by how closely your experiences align with that script.
A few months ago my fiancee, Erica, and I took a two week trip to India. As someone with an interest in ancient wisdom, I was excited to see what lessons or experiences I could extract that would be helpful to me and my readers. But my experience wasn’t of the Eat, Pray, Love variety where
Over the past year my Facebook feed has been loaded with lots of partisan posts, and, because I disgaree with the political views of most of my Facebook friends, this generally irritated me. Now that the election is over, I’m hoping we can move past this animosity and get back to normal. But, I expect this is unrealistic
Some of you who have been following this project for a while know that I have a long time girlfriend who is sometimes mentioned in my posts. Well, I’m pleased to say that going forward I will refer to her as my “fiancee.” I proposed to her in August (yes, this post is very late)
I started The Ancient Wisdom Project because I was getting frustrated with most of the advice the popular personal development/lifestyle design bloggers were espousing. I decided that ancient wisdom traditions would have time-tested practices and philosophies that would be better that anything some 30-year old would have to say about making your life better and more
My goal for my Judaism month was to discover why Judaism fosters such a strong sense of community, despite being the religion of a very small minority of the global population. It was a fascinating month, and it made me wonder how secular, non-Jewish people could purposely find a community to join or cultivate one. So, of
Anika reached out to me earlier this year asking to participate in the AWP Reader Experiments challenge I advertised earlier this year. As a 22-year old graduate student in Pune, India, she felt that she needed ancient wisdom to help her with a few things most of us struggle with: anxiety, procrastination, and a shortage
Over the past month or so I’ve been rotating through a few different books, all of which are of the pop academic genre. For example, I’m about halfway through The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk-Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind. It’s a fun book by a former trader turned academic that describes,