Regret is a turbine of self-destruction, remorse an engine of renewal. Drawing on the etymological and cultural heritage of both words, historian Tiffany Watt Smith offers a revelatory distinction between the two, both subtle and profound.
We also live in culture — encoded in each language are a culture's parameters of what it is permissible to feel, which we internalize as the parameters of what it is possible to feel. It helps, then, to have a larger lexicon of emotion — larger than our given language, in order to take back the expansiveness of our experience by liberating it from the constraints of culture.
It is a fallacy, a dangerous myth, that this wish should be dispassionate — letting go can be as passionate as love itself, as much an act of devotion, for only a rigor of feeling can ensure not the termination but the transmutation of a relationship.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
You've probably been told that better choices come from more data or sharper reasoning, but neuroscience shows us that our choices are fundamentally emotional. Our feelings are the underlying 'context-setters' on which our rational brain acts. When we avoid certain emotional states, our solution set becomes constrained in ways we may not even be aware of.
Over years of interviews with founders, athletes, investors, and operators, I realized that what separates people is in the hidden advantages — the mindsets, habits, emotional patterns, and ways of seeing the world that compound quietly over time.
4mo ago
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. Yet I would not exchange this sadness for the complacency of those who have ceased to be responsive.
When you see anger, it's just the tip of the iceberg. Anger is the secondary emotion. The primary emotion could be sadness, could be disappointment, could be stress.
Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.
6mo ago
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. Yet I would not exchange this for the false comfort of those who have ceased to feel.
Fiction to expand one's creativity and empathy. To experience emotions and other perspectives that would otherwise be unknown.
6mo ago
We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by drowning in all those thoughts. We think too much and feel too little. We have lost our minds and forgotten our hearts.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
