Apotheosis Ryan Thompson

Few activities create more anxiety than thinking about the future. However, when we let go of the need for certainty, we prepare our minds for clarity and creativity to bloom. Whenever we’re faced with a hard problem or a major decision, we often find ourselves gripped with anxiety. Our minds churn with visions of the many ways things might go wrong.However, we can take comfort in the fact that nobody knows what's going to happen. While uncertainty often makes us uncomfortable, it also ...

We fill our homes with too much stuff, our calendars with too many activities, and our minds with too much mental chatter. When we practice saying no and letting go, we make more space for the things that truly deliver value in our lives. If you’ve ever been in the home of an extreme hoarder, you will recognize how useless a room becomes from an excess of stuff. With junk piled on every surface from floor to ceiling, you have to carve a path just to walk across the room.When we lack spa...

We have greater access to information than ever, but not all is reliable. Who should we trust? The Buddha’s ten criteria for countering misinformation can help.We live in an age in which actual misinformation farms exist. However, the problem of untrustworthy information is not new. The difficulty of sorting out signal from noise goes back at least 2,500 years to the Buddha’s time.Frustrated and confused by the conflicting messages they received from wandering spiritual teachers, a group of r...

We make hundreds of decisions each day. Making the right decision depends on the possible outcomes. One helpful approach is to ask ourselves, “Will this action create more suffering or less?”Some of the decisions we make every day are easy enough: what to eat, what free-time activities to pursue, or when to make a dentist appointment. Other decisions have a bigger impact and require more thought.A Buddhist teaching called the Eightfold Path offers a practical approach to improving the outcome...

We humans are far less rational than we’d like to believe. Even very smart people make all kinds of bad decisions. Aristotle’s rules for deliberation still serve as a practical method to slow down, clarify thinking, and improve decision-making.Aesop’s classic fable of the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs conveys an issue at the heart of human society: we can be really bad at decision-making. We often make decisions that satisfy a craving in the short term but at the expense of the long term.Re...

No doubt this is unwelcome news, but your brain is riddled with biases that can lead to unclear thinking and poor decisions. Intentional, systematic decision-making processes can reduce their influence.We are faced with countless decisions every day. To help us make sense of the world and make rapid decisions, our brains evolved a wide range of biases and mental shortcuts called heuristics.Most of the time, these shortcuts serve us well. Other times, they can lead us to make some really dumb ...