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| 22 | heaven! Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy |
| 23 | and a free heart: thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causeth his down-going. I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowereth over man: they herald the coming |
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| 12-12 | Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it wont matter how successful you become or who is in your life— you wont enjoy any of it |
| 18-18 | Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world. |
| 17-17 | Nothing in this book needs to be accepted on faith. Although my focus is on human subjectivity—I am, after all, talking about the nature of experience itself—all my assertions can be tested in the laboratory of your own life. In fact, my goal is to encourage you to do just that |
| 27-27 | a true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason |
| 40-40 | The fact that your mind is all you have and that it is possible to be at peace even in difficult circumstances can become an argument for ignoring obvious societal problems. But it is not a compelling one. The world is in desperate need of improvement— in global terms, freedom and prosperity remain the exception— and yet this doesn’t mean we need to be miserable while we work for the common good |
| 21-21 | It seems to me that I spend much of my waking life in a neurotic trance. My experiences in meditation suggest, however, that an alternative exists. It is possible to stand free of the juggernaut of self, if only for moments at a time |
| 22-22 | We seek pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, and moods. We satisfy our intellectual curiosity. We surround ourselves with friends and loved ones. We become connoisseurs of art, music, or food. But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps a day, but then they subside. And the search goes on. The effort required to keep boredom and other unpleasantness at bay must continue, moment to moment. |
| 22-22 | Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment. Realizing this, many people begin to wonder whether a deeper source of well-being exists. Is there a form of happiness beyond the mere repetition of pleasure and avoidance of pain? Is there a happiness that does not depend upon having ones favorite foods available, or friends and loved ones within arms reach, or good books to read, or something to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before ones desires are gratified, in spite of lifes difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death? |
| 23-23 | If there exists a source of psychological well-being that does not depend upon merely gratifying ones desires, then it should be present even when all the usual sources of pleasure have been removed. Such happiness should be available to a person who has declined to marry her high school sweetheart, renounced her career and material possessions, and gone off to a cave or some other spot that is inhospitable to ordinary aspirations |
| 23-23 | One clue to how daunting most people would find such a project is the fact that solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are talking about— is considered a punishment inside a maximum-security prison. Even when forced to live among murderers and rapists, most people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of time alone in a room. And yet contemplatives in many traditions claim to experience extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while living in isolation for vast stretches of time. How should we interpret this? Either the contemplative literature is a catalogue of religious delusion, psychopathology, and deliberate fraud, or people have been having liberating insights under the name of “spirituality” and “mysticism” for millennia. |
| 24-24 | what contemplatives throughout history have discovered is that there is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves; there is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that pops into consciousness. And glimpsing this alternative dispels the conventional illusion of the self |
| 24-24 | Most traditions of spirituality also suggest a connection between self-transcendence and living ethically. Not all good feelings have an ethical valence, and pathological forms of ecstasy surely exist. I have no doubt, for instance, that many suicide bombers feel extraordinarily good just before they detonate themselves in a crowd. But there are also forms of mental pleasure that are intrinsically ethical. As I indicated earlier, for some states of consciousness, a phrase like “boundless love” does not seem overblown. |
| 25-25 | On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow ones own advice |
| 25-25 | The problem of finding happiness in this world arrives with our first breath— and our needs and desires seem to multiply by the hour. |
| 26-26 | The burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health and fitness, most people find it enjoyable. Here we see that cognition and emotion are not separate. The way we think about experience can completely determine how we feel about it. |
| 26-26 | And we always face tensions and trade-offs. In some moments we crave excitement and in others rest. We might love the taste of wine and chocolate, but rarely for breakfast. Whatever the context, our minds are perpetually moving—generally toward pleasure (or its imagined source) and away from pain. |
| 25-25 | Seeking, finding, maintaining, and safeguarding our well-being is the great project to which we all are devoted, whether or not we choose to think in these terms. |
| 26-26 | Our struggle to navigate the space of possible pains and pleasures produces most of human culture. Medical science attempts to prolong our health and to reduce the suffering associated with illness, aging, and death. All forms of media cater to our thirst for information and entertainment. Political and economic institutions seek to ensure our peaceful collaboration with one another—and the police or the military is summoned when they fail. Beyond ensuring our survival, civilization is a vast machine invented by the human mind to regulate its states. We are ever in the process of creating and repairing a world that our minds want to be in. And wherever we look, we see the evidence of our successes and our failures. Unfortunately, failure enjoys a natural advantage. Wrong answers to any problem outnumber right ones by a wide margin, and it seems that it will always be easier to break things than to fix them |
| 27-27 | pleasures, however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature fleeting. They begin to subside the instant they arise, only to be replaced by fresh desires or feelings of discomfort. |
| 27-27 | We seem to do little more than lurch between wanting and not wanting. Thus, the question naturally arises: Is there more to life than this? Might it be possible to feel much better (in every sense of better) than one tends to feel? Is it possible to find lasting fulfillment despite the inevitability of change? |
| 40-40 | The teachings of Buddhism, and of Eastern spirituality generally, focus on the primacy of the mind. There are dangers in this way of viewing the world, to be sure. Focusing on training the mind to the exclusion of all else can lead to political quietism and hive-like conformity. The fact that your mind is all you have and that it is possible to be at peace even in difficult circumstances can become an argument for ignoring obvious societal problems. But it is not a compelling one. The world is in desperate need of improvement— in global terms, freedom and prosperity remain the exception— and yet this doesn’t mean we need to be miserable while we work for the common good. |
| 40-40 | One can, for instance, spend long periods of time in contemplative solitude for the purpose of becoming a better person in the world—having better relationships, being more honest and compassionate and, therefore, |
| 41-41 | more helpful to ones fellow human beings. Being wisely selfish and being selfless can amount to very much the same thing. |
| 43-43 | Nothing I say here is intended as a denial of the fact that psychological well-being requires a healthy ‘sense of self”—with all the capacities that this vague phrase implies. Children need to become autonomous, confident, and self-aware in order to form healthy relationships. And they must acquire a host of other cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal skills in the process of becoming sane and productive adults. |
| 44-44 | It is always now. This might sound trite, but it is the truth. Its not quite true as a matter of neurology, because our minds are built upon layers of inputs whose timing we know must be different.11 But it is true as a matter of conscious experience. The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world. But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth— overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain— and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running. As a consequence, we spend our lives being far less content than we might otherwise be. We often fail to appreciate what we have until we have lost it. We crave experiences, objects, relationships, only to grow bored with them. And yet the craving persists. |
| 45-45 | The quality of mind cultivated in vipassana is almost always referred to as “mindfulness,” and the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial. There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness. |
| 46-46 | Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body— thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant. |
| 46-46 | The principal enemy of mindfulness— or of any meditative |
| 47-47 | practice— is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts. The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking. In fact, thoughts of all kinds can be perfectly good objects of mindfulness. In the early stages of ones practice, however, the arising of thought will be more or less synonymous with distraction— that is, with a failure to meditate. |
| 47-47 | In the beginning of ones meditation practice, the difference between ordinary experience and what one comes to consider “mindfulness” is not very clear, and it takes some training to distinguish between being lost in thought and seeing thoughts for what they are. In this sense, learning to meditate is just like acquiring any other skill. It takes many thousands of repetitions to throw a good jab or to coax music from the strings of a guitar. With practice, mindfulness becomes a well-formed habit of attention, and the difference between it and ordinary thinking will become increasingly clear. Eventually, it begins to seem as if you are repeatedly awakening from a dream to find yourself safely in bed. No matter how terrible the dream, the relief is instantaneous. And yet it is difficult to stay awake for more than a few seconds at a time. |
| 47-47 | likens this shift in awareness to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall. Your |
| 48-48 | perception is unchanged, but the spell is broken. Most of us spend every waking moment lost in the movie of our lives. Until we see that an alternative to this enchantment exists, we are entirely at the mercy of appearances. Again, the difference I am describing is not a matter of achieving a new conceptual understanding or of adopting new beliefs about the nature of reality. The change comes when we experience the present moment prior to the arising of thought. |
| 48-48 | A better translation would be “unsatisfactoriness.” Suffering may not be inherent in life, but unsatisfactoriness is. We crave lasting happiness in the midst of change: Our bodies age, cherished objects break, pleasures fade, relationships fail. Our attachment to the good things in life and our aversion to the bad amount to a denial of these realities, and this inevitably leads to feelings of dissatisfaction. Mindfulness is a technique for achieving equanimity amid the flux, allowing us to simply be aware of the quality of experience in each moment, whether pleasant or unpleasant. This may seem like a recipe for apathy, but it neednt be. It is actually possible to be mindful— and, therefore, to be at peace with the present moment— even while working to change the world for the better. |
| 48-48 | The simple instructions given in the box that follows are analogous to instructions on how to walk a tightrope |
| 52-52 | Even for extraordinarily lucky people, life is difficult. And when we look at what makes it so, we see that we are all prisoners of our thoughts. |
| 53-53 | full enlightenment”— is generally described as “omniscient.” Just what this means is open to a fair bit of caviling. But however narrowly defined, the claim is absurd. If the historical Buddha were “omniscient,” he would have been, at minimum, a better mathematician, physicist, biologist, and Jeopardy contestant than any person who has ever lived. Is it reasonable to expect that an ascetic in the fifth century BC, by virtue of his meditative insights, spontaneously became an unprecedented genius in every field of human inquiry, including those that did not exist at the time in which he lived? |
| 53-53 | I make no claims in support of magic or miracles in this book. However, I can say that the true goal of meditation is more profound than most people realize— and it does, in fact, encompass many of the experiences that traditional mystics claim for themselves. It is quite possible to lose ones sense of being a separate self and to experience a kind of boundless, open awareness— to feel, in other words, at one with the cosmos. This says a lot about the possibilities of human consciousness, but it says nothing about |
| 54-54 | the universe at large. And it sheds no light at all on the relationship between mind and matter. The fact that it is possible to love one s neighbor as oneself should be a great finding for the field of psychology, but it lends absolutely no credence to the claim that Jesus was the son of God, or even that God exists. Nor does it suggest that the “energy” of love somehow pervades the cosmos. These are historical and metaphysical claims that personal experience cannot justify. |
| 54-54 | However, a phenomenon like self-transcending love does entide us to make claims about the human mind. And this particular experience is so well attested and so readily achieved by those who devote themselves to specific practices (the Buddhist technique of metta meditation, for instance) or who even take the right drug (MDMA) that there is very little controversy that it exists. Facts of this kind must now be understood in a rational context. |
| 54-54 | The traditional goal of meditation is to arrive at a state of wellbeing that is imperturbable— or if perturbed, easily regained. The French monk Matthieu Ricard describes such happiness as “a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind.”15 The purpose of meditation is to recognize that you already have such a mind. That discovery, in turn, helps you to cease doing the things that produce needless confusion and suffering for yourself and others. O f course, most people never truly master the practice and dont reach a condition of imperturbable happiness. The near goal, therefore, is to have an increasingly healthy mind— that is, to be moving ones mind in the right direction |
| 55-55 | The question of whether enlightenment is a permanent state need not detain us. The crucial point is that you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from suffering in the present. Even just recognizing the impermanence of your mental states— deeply, not merely as an idea—can transform your life. Every mental state you have ever had has arisen and then passed away. |
| 56-56 | I have never met another person who denied that some of us are stronger, more athletic, or more learned than others. But many people find it difficult to acknowledge that a continuum of moral and spiritual wisdom exists or that there might be better and worse ways to traverse it. |
| 57-57 | We must learn to use language before we can work with it creatively or understand its limits, and the conventional self must form before we can investigate it and understand that it is not what it appears to be |
| 57-57 | But it is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it. |
| 59-59 | the associated pleasures, raping and pillaging cant be a stable strategy for finding happiness in this world. Given our social requirements, we know that the deepest and most durable forms of well-being must be compatible with an ethical concern for other people— even for complete strangers— otherwise, violent conflict becomes inevitable. We also know that there are certain forms of happiness that are not available to a person even if, like Genghis Khan, he finds himself on the winning side of every siege. Some pleasures are intrinsically ethical— feelings like love, gratitude, devotion, and compassion. To inhabit these states of mind is, by definition, to be brought into alignment with others. |
| 58-58 | No doubt certain people can derive mental pleasure— and even experience genuine ecstasy—by behaving in ways that produce immense suffering for others. But we know that these states are anomalous— or, at least, not sustainable— because we depend upon one another for more or less everything. Whatever |
| 63-63 | Instead, the birth of consciousness must be the result of organization: Arranging atoms in certain ways appears to bring about an experience of being that very collection of atoms. |
| 62-62 | He is simply asking you to imagine trading places with a bat. If you would be left with any experience, however indescribable— some spectrum of sights, sounds, sensations, feelings— that is what consciousness is in the case of a bat. If being transformed into a bat were tantamount t:o annihilation, however, then bats are not conscious |
| 64-64 | Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion. |
| 65-65 | There is simply no question that your ability to decode and understand this sentence depends upon neurophysiological events taking place inside your head at this moment. But most of this mental work occurs entirely in the dark, and it is a mystery why any part of the process should be attended by consciousness |
| 67-67 | I am sympathetic with those who, like the philosopher Colin McGinn and the psychologist Steven Pinker, have suggested that perhaps the emergence of consciousness is simply incomprehensible in human terms.17 Every chain of explanation must end somewhere— generally with a brute fact that neglects to explain itself. Perhaps consciousness presents an impasse of this sort. |
| 68-68 | Fluidity really is “nothing but” the free motion of molecules. For this explanation to be sufficient, we must admit that molecules exist, of course, but once we do, the problem is solved. No one has described a set of unconscious events whose sufficiency as a cause of consciousness would make sense in this way |
| 69-69 | Much work in biology remains to be done, but anyone who entertains vitalism*at this point is simply ignorant about the nature of living systems |
| 70-70 | Again, there is nothing about a brain, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might harbor consciousness— apart from the fact that we experience consciousness direcdy and have correlated many of its contents, or lack thereof, with processes in our brains |
| 70-70 | Consider, for instance, our experience of seeing an object: Its color, contours, apparent motion, and location in space arise in consciousness as a seamless unity, even though this information is processed by many separate systems in the brain. Thus, when a golfer prepares to hit a shot, he does not first see the balls roundness, then its whiteness, and only then its position on the tee. Rather, he enjoys a unified perception of the ball. Many neuroscientists believe that this phenomenon of “binding” can be explained by disparate groups of neurons firing in synchrony.24 Whether or not this theory is true, it is at least intelligible— because synchronous activity seems just the sort of thing that could explain the unity of a percept. This work suggests, as many other findings in neuroscience do, that the contents of consciousness can often be made sense of in terms of their underlying neurophysiology.25 However, when we ask why such phenomena should be experienced in the first place, we are returned to the mystery of consciousness in full |
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| 154-154 | They called to all of the messaging that I and so many other black people had been inundated with their entire lives—there are black people who deserve equality, and black people who don’t—and if you don’t, you have nobody to blame but yourself. I would second-guess myself, check my language, quiet my voice. But a quieter, gentler voice did not bring a quieter, gentler world. All it did was give people the impression that I was okay with living like a second-class citizen. All it did was increase my burden. |
| 154-154 | Martin Luther King was public enemy number one. Seen as an even greater threat by our government, and a large portion of society, than Malcolm X was. Because what Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X fought for was the same: freedom from oppression. At times they used different words and different tactics, but it was their goal that was the threat. Their goal of freedom from racial oppression was and is a direct threat to the system of White Supremacy. And for all of Martin’s actions of peace and love, he was targeted with violence, harassed, arrested, blackmailed, followed by the FBI, and eventually murdered |
| 154-154 | Martin Luther King was public enemy number one. Seen as an even greater threat by our government, and a large portion of society, than Malcolm X was. Because what Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X fought for was the same: freedom from oppression. At times they used different words and different tactics, but it was their goal that was the threat. Their goal of freedom from racial oppression was and is a direct threat to the system of White Supremacy. And for all of Martin’s actions of peace and love, he was targeted with violence, harassed, arrested, blackmailed, followed by the FBI, and eventually murdered. For all of the pedestals MLK is now put on, far above the reach of ordinary black Americans, Martin was in his life viewed as the most dangerous man in America. Martin was the black man who asked for too much, too loudly |
| 155-155 | Because if you believe in justice and equality you believe in it all of the time, for all people. You believe in it for newborn babies, you believe in it for single mothers, you believe in it for kids in the street, you believe in justice and equality for people you like and people you don’t. You believe in it for people who don’t say please. |
| 166-166 | do you want to look like a better person, or do you want to be a better person? Because those who just want to look like a better person will have great difficulty with the introspection necessary to actually be a better person. In order to do better we must be willing to hold our darkness to the light, we must be willing to shatter our own veneer of “goodness” |
| 165-165 | You are racist because you were born and bred in a racist, white supremacist society. White Supremacy is, as I’ve said earlier, insidious by design. The racism required to uphold White Supremacy is woven into every area of our lives. There is no way you can inherit white privilege from birth, learn racist white supremacist history in schools, consume racist and white supremacist movies and films, work in a racist and white supremacist workforce, and vote for racist and white supremacist governments and not be racist. |
| 171-171 | I’ve seen how addicted people can get to the satisfaction of knowing they are saying all the right things, that they are having “deep conversations”—so addicted that it becomes the end-all and be-all of their racial justice goals. |
| 171-171 | I write about concepts that I think people are not understanding. I write about pieces of the puzzle that I think people aren’t seeing. I write from perspectives that I think many people don’t get to hear. I do not do this just to increase general knowledge. I do not do this just to make people feel better. I do this in the hopes that what I write and say, and what others write and say, will inform and inspire action. |
| 172-172 | Countless people read my work about racial justice and instead of taking action, want to shake that Etch A Sketch like it never happened and ask for the same conversation all over again. |
| 172-172 | After a few times of agreeing to “talk some more” and once again finding myself “talked over” I realized that “talk” was all they wanted to get out of it |
| 172-172 | After a few times of agreeing to “talk some more” and once again finding myself “talked over” I realized that “talk” was all they wanted to get out of it. At least once a week an organization will ask me to come talk, free of charge, to them about race |
| 172-172 | After a few times of agreeing to “talk some more” and once again finding myself “talked over” I realized that “talk” was all they wanted to get out of it. At least once a week an organization will ask me to come talk, free of charge, to them about race. They are big fans of my work and just want to be able to have their own private conversations with me. “We would like a safe space to really get educated,” one said. These are people who have read my work, had likely stopped by on social media to “like” posts and leave encouraging comments. These are people who have read my words on the |
| 173-173 | mental, physical, and financial exploitation of black people and especially black women and the way in which it contributes to oppression. They have read the pain in my stories, and it resonated with them enough that they wanted me to repeat it all on demand, for free. This is talk that will make them sad, make them frustrated, make them cry. But it won’t make them take action. They want to feel better, but they don’t want to do better. |
| 177-177 | We saw that action take hold in the March 2015 reelection bid of Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, who after numerous high-profile police brutality cases where Alvarez was seen as less than responsive— including what many view to be a cover-up and thirteen-month delay in pressing charges in the horrific shooting of seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot sixteen times as he walked away from officers— was handed a resounding defeat to challenger Kim Foxx. This defeat was the result not only of numerous protests in and around Chicago, but of organized efforts of Chicago activists to support Alvarez’s challenger and get out the vote on election day |
| 177-177 | I’ll never forget the outrage in 2016 over a district prosecutor who refused to press charges against a cop who was filmed shooting an unarmed black man. People were tweeting their anger at the prosecutor, sharing Facebook posts about how frustrated they were that once again, a cop was going to get away with murder. But when I looked up information for the district attorney, I realized that he was up for reelection later that year. I immediately started replying to the Tweets and messages of frustration that I was seeing: “THIS PERSON IS RUNNING FOR REELECTION—GIVE YOUR MONEY TO HIS CHALLENGER. MAKE AN EXAMPLE OF HIM.” Because I already knew that if moral arguments and outrage were going to persuade a district attorney to press charges against an officer for shooting an unarmed black person, we would have seen more than only eighteen officers charged with unlawful death in 2015, in over 1,100 killings of civilians by police that year. But everyone responds to threats to their livelihood. And declining to indict an officer when there is video proof of severe misconduct should be a decision that a prosecuting attorney cannot afford to make. We saw that action take hold in the March 2015 reelection bid of Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, who after numerous high-profile police brutality cases where Alvarez was seen as less than responsive— including what many view to be a cover-up and thirteen-month delay in pressing charges in the horrific shooting of seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot sixteen times as he walked away from officers— was handed a resounding defeat to challenger Kim Foxx. This defeat was the result not only of numerous protests in and around Chicago, but of organized efforts of Chicago activists to support Alvarez’s challenger and get out the vote on election day |
| 176-176 | Vote for diverse government representatives |
| 14-14 | “I live in a world where if I have a ‘black sounding’ name, I’m less likely to even be called for a job interview. Will I equally benefit from raising minimum wages when I can’t even get a job? |
| 14-14 | “If I do get a good job and do what society says I should do and save up and buy a house—will I benefit equally when the fact that I live in a ‘black neighborhood’ means that my house will be worth far less? Will I benefit equally when I’m much more likely to get higher mortgage rates from my bank, or predatory loans that will skyrocket in cost after a few years causing me to foreclose and lose my home and equity and credit, because of the color of my skin?” |
| 14-14 | If I am able to get what is considered a decent wage for the ‘average’ American, but my son is locked up in jail like one in three black men are predicted to be, so I’m raising my grandkids on my meager salary, will stronger unions really raise me out of poverty? |
| 14-14 | If I’m more likely to be suspended and expelled from school, because even since preschool my teachers are more likely to see my |
| 15-15 | Can’t we focus on this first to get everybody behind it and then address the race stuff?” To which I sigh and say, “That’s the promise that’s been made to us for hundreds of years. Those are the words of every labor movement that managed to help white America so much more than everyone else. Those are the words that ‘move everybody forward’ but in the exact same place, with the exact same hierarchy, and the exact same oppressions. Those words are why the wealth gap between whites and blacks is just as bad as it was when Dr. King was leading marches. We’re still waiting. We’re still hoping. We’re still left behind.” |
| 15-15 | RACE AS WE KNOW IT IN THE US IS CLOSELY INTEGRATED with our economic system. The system of racism functioned primarily as a justification for the barbaric act of chattel slavery and the genocide of Indigenous Americans. You cannot put chains around the necks of other human beings or slaughter them wholesale, while maintaining social rules that prohibit such treatment, without first designating those people as somewhat less than human. And later, the function of racism was somewhat repurposed as a way of dividing lower classes, still with the ultimate goal of the economic and political supremacy of white elites. |
| 16-16 | Even the election of our first black president did not lessen the lure of this promise to draw people to their support of racism. If anything, the election strengthened it. His election was a clear, undeniable sign that some black people could get more, and then what about everyone else’s share? Those who had always blatantly or subconsciously depended on that promise, that they would get more because others would get less, were threatened in ways that they could not put words to. But suddenly, this didn’t feel like “their country” anymore. Suddenly, they didn’t feel like “their needs” were being met. |
| 28-28 | Getting my neighbor to love people of color might make it easier to hang around him, but it won’t do anything to combat police brutality, racial income inequality, food deserts, or the prison industrial complex. Further, this approach puts the onus on me, the person being discriminated against, to prove my humanity and worthiness of equality to those who think I’m less than. But so much of what we think and feel about people of other races is dictated by our system, and not our hearts. Who we see as successful, who has access to that success, who we see as scary, what traits we value in society, who we see as “smart” and “beautiful”—these perceptions are determined by our proximity to the cultural values of the majority in power, the economic system of those in power, the education system of those in power, the media outlets of those in power—I could go on, but at no point will you find me laying blame at the feet of one misguided or even hateful white person, saying, “and this is Steve’s fault— core beliefs about black people are all determined by Steve over there who just decided he hates black people all on his own.” Steve is interacting with the system in the way in which it’s designed, and the end result is racial bigotry that supports the continued oppression of people of color |
| 29-29 | So a good question to ask yourself right now is: why are you here? Did you pick up this book with the ultimate goal of getting people to be nicer to each other? Did you pick up this book with the goal of making more friends of different races? Or did you pick up this book with the goal of helping fight a system of oppression that is literally killing people of color? Because if you insist on holding to a definition of racism that reduces itself to “any time somebody is mean to somebody of a different race” then this is not the book to accomplish your goals. And those are real and noble goals when we call them what they are—we really should be more kind to each other. But when I look at what is putting me and millions of other people of color at risk, a lack of niceness from white people toward me and people who look like me is very far down the list of priorities |
| 30-30 | How do you fix the school-to-prison pipeline on an emotional basis? How do you fix an economic system that values the work done traditionally by white males over that done by women and people of color on an emotional basis? How do you change an education system tailored almost exclusively to the experiences, history, and goals of white families on an emotional basis? How do you address an overwhelmingly white system of government on an emotional basis? We can get every person in America to feel nothing but love for people of color in their hearts, and if our systems aren’t acknowledged and changed, it will bring negligible benefit to the lives of people of color. |
| 62-62 | intersectionality” was born from Crenshaw’s work to shed light on the ways in which experiences in both race and gender intertwine to uniquely impact the lives of black women and women of color. Crenshaw referred to those intersections of race and gender as intersectionality and stressed the need to consider intersectionality in our social justice movements |
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| 16-16 | path that researcher William Miller has labeled “quantum change,” in which a minority of people do suddenly completely shift course—as opposed to the more typical gradual |
| 16-16 | Indeed, research suggests that having an intention to do something only predicts engaging in the desired behavior about 33% of the time, even for people without drug problems. Learning a new behavior typically takes time. |
| 16-16 | could also be the case that my brain’s natural maturation process finally reached the point where my “executive function” could begin to put the brakes on the regions that create desire—and this change allowed my epiphany to save my life. |
| 21-21 | the expert consensus is that serious addiction only affects a minority of those who try even the most highly addictive drugs, and even among this group, recovery without treatment is the rule rather than the exception. |
| 26-26 | During the five previous times I’d made it through physical withdrawal over the course of my opioid addiction, I found that when I was the most sick was not when I had the most craving—nearly the opposite was true. I was at greatest risk of taking heroin again when I felt better and decided that withdrawal hadn’t been so bad and that I could use occasionally and avoid becoming physically dependent. |
| 26-26 | just a physical need for a substance to avoid withdrawal, though that doesn’t help matters any. Physical withdrawal symptoms are nothing compared to psychological desires: what matters in addiction is what you want or, yes, believe you need, not whether you feel sick or even how sick you feel. During the five previous times I’d made it through physical withdrawal over the course of my opioid addiction, I found that when I was the most sick was not when I had the most craving—nearly the opposite was true. I was at greatest risk of taking heroin again when I felt better and decided that withdrawal hadn’t been so bad and that I could use occasionally and avoid becoming physically dependent. |
| 26-26 | During the five previous times I’d made it through physical withdrawal over the course of my opioid addiction, I found that when I was the most sick was not when I had the most craving—nearly the opposite was true. I was at greatest risk of taking heroin again when I felt better and decided that withdrawal hadn’t been so bad and that I could use occasionally and avoid becoming physically dependent. |
| 26-26 | Physical withdrawal symptoms are nothing compared to psychological desires: what matters in addiction is what you want or, yes, believe you need, not whether you feel sick or even how sick you feel. During the five previous times I’d made it through physical withdrawal over the course of my opioid addiction, I found that when I was the most sick was not when I had the most craving—nearly the opposite was true. I was at greatest risk of taking heroin again when I felt better and decided that withdrawal hadn’t been so bad and that I could use occasionally and avoid becoming physically dependent. |
| 27-27 | The first night, in fact, I didn’t get any rest at all, just tossed and turned and threw up. My legs ached terribly and I banged them against the bed in a vain effort to knock the pain out. This common response is probably why they call heroin withdrawal “kicking.” When I ran to the bathroom, I couldn’t bear seeing my hugely dilated pupils in the mirror over the sink. Their gaping vacancy reminded me that my eyes were now in the opposite state of the blissfully tiny pinpoint pupils that you exhibit while high on opioids. Everything was painful and loud and bright and discomfiting. And the temperature was never right. I was either freezing or sweating profusely. |
| 27-27 | I had three emotional states in detox: depression, euphoria, and boredom. I swung rapidly between them. One moment, I’d be manic and grandiose: it was all going to work out and I would soon be back on my rightful path to fame, fortune, and greatness! The next, I’d be crushed by physical discomfort and plunged into utter despair about my legal situation: 15 years in prison, mandatory minimum, no parole, no chance at a better life. Then, I’d be overcome with desire to start some great project, anything to distract me from the dullness of where I was, although I couldn’t conceive of what it should be or muster enough energy even to try to do so |
| 27-27 | I was still losing weight at this point; I went from 85 pounds down to 80 in my seven days in the hospital. I lay in the warm water, often twitching with nervous discomfort |
| 28-28 | the physical symptoms aren’t the main problem. What makes drug withdrawal hard to take is the anxiety, the insomnia, and the sense of losing the only thing you have that makes life bearable and worth living, not the puking and the shaking. It’s the mental and emotional symptoms—the learned connection between drugs and relief and between lack of drugs and pain—that matter. In fact, it’s this type of existential terror and anxiety that actually gives the most excruciating flourish to any bad experience: the meaning of pain profoundly affects how it is felt, and the more worry and fear involved, the worse the suffering. Pain that is viewed as life threatening literally feels more intense and agonizing than pain with a known, nondangerous origin or time frame; studies find that people who believe a particular type of pain means that worse is to come actually rate it as more severe on pain scales than they do if they have the exact same physical experience but can be reassured that it’s nothing to fear. Gavril Pasternak, a pain specialist at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, once described a classic case of this phenomenon to me. A patient he’d treated for breast cancer pain returned years later with an aching back. She thought that her back pain meant that the cancer had returned and would soon kill her. She wanted opioids. But, in fact, there had been no recurrence. After testing ruled out cancer and Pasternak told her that she had garden variety disc pain, her relief was immediate. She no longer felt the pain to be unbearable and didn’t want any kind of drugs. It was her analysis of what the pain meant that had tormented her. The psychology and the experience of pain are inseparable. Moreover, no matter whether the source of pain is obviously “physical” or “just psychological,” the unpleasant aspect of the experience is processed by many of the same parts of the brain. Not coincidentally, these regions are rich in opioid receptors. Without heroin, my receptors were screaming for relief, the addiction having reduced or otherwise disabled my natural supply of endorphins and enkephalins, which are the brain’s heroin-like neurotransmitters. Mostly, I felt utterly stripped of safety and love. And so, what tormented me most as I shook through August of 1988 wasn’t the nausea and chills but the recurring fear that I’d never have lasting comfort or joy again |
| 29-29 | if addiction is simply needing something to function, we are all food, water, and air addicts and the term is pretty well meaningless |
| 31-31 | In addiction, adolescence is the high-risk period because this is when the brain changes to prepare for adult sexuality and responsibilities and when people begin to develop ways of coping that will serve them for the rest of their lives. For example, the odds of alcoholism for those who start drinking at age 14 or younger are nearly 50%—but they drop to 9% for those who start at age 21 or later. And the risk of rapidly developing addiction to marijuana, cocaine, opioids, and pills like Valium is two to four times greater for those who start using at age 11–17, compared to those who start at 18 or later. If you manage to make it through adolescence and young adulthood without developing an addictive coping style, your odds of developing one later, while not nonexistent, are dramatically reduced |
| 31-31 | Addiction, then, is a coping style that becomes maladaptive when the behavior persists despite ongoing negative consequences. This persistence occurs because “overlearning” or reduced brain plasticity makes the behavior extremely resistant to change. Plasticity is the brain’s ability to learn or change with experience. Lowered plasticity means this ability is compromised, and when a pattern of activity is locked in, it is “overlearned.” The capacity for such overlearning is a feature of the brain’s motivational systems, which evolved to promote survival and reproduction. The strong drives that these systems create can be useful when they spur persistence in love, work, and parenting. However, their intense resistance to change becomes a “bug” in our programming when drug taking or other unhealthy activities continue in the face of ongoing harm. |
| 31-31 | Moreover, unlike ordinary forms of learning, addiction involves interference with the brain processes that themselves guide decision making and motivation by determining the emotional weight of various options. It alters the way the brain decides what it values—for example |
| 31-31 | Moreover, unlike ordinary forms of learning, addiction involves interference with the brain processes that themselves guide decision making and motivation by determining the emotional weight of various options. It alters the way the brain decides what it values—for example, by making cocaine seem more important than college or by making all other pleasures pale |
| 32-32 | THERE IS A Polaroid picture of me taken the day I entered rehab, on August 11, 1988. My pupils are so large from withdrawal that my blue eyes look black, and because I’m so thin, they are deeply sunken into my face. I have dark roots showing under my bleached blond hair and it is still scraggly and patchy from the hair pulling I’d done while using coke. My nose looks like I’d taken a punch—I’m not sure why, but it is swollen well beyond its normal size, even though I’d shot all my drugs rather than snorted them for years by that point. I’m smiling but I look utterly vacant and tentative. I’m so frail that I look old; except for the smoothness of my face, you’d never guess I was in my 20s. The muscles in my neck and my collarbone stick out, and on the back of the hand that’s draped on the counter, you can make out the red lines of my tracks if you look closely. Indeed, 26 years later, I still have faint scars there. |
| 33-33 | That drive to return to the past isn’t an innocent one. It’s about stopping your passage to the future, it’s a symptom of fear of death, and the love of predictable experience. And the love of predictable experience, not the drug itself, is the major damage done to users. |
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| 20-20 | as CEO of Manhattan Prep I’d taught the analyst classes at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and many other companies. These college graduates often seemed disenchanted with their careers; they were looking to go to business school to take a break and find the next step. Many of them hailed from other parts of the country—Michigan, Ohio, Georgia—and had come to Wall Street for better opportunities. When I talked to them after class, they seemed to be searching for some higher purpose that had eluded them. They reminded me of myself a decade earlier, when I had started my career as an unhappy corporate lawyer. |
| 20-20 | as CEO of Manhattan Prep I’d taught the analyst classes at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and many other companies. These college graduates often seemed disenchanted with their careers; they were looking to go to business school to take a break and find the next step. Many of them hailed from other parts of the country—Michigan, Ohio, Georgia—and had come to Wall Street for better opportunities. When I talked to them after class, they seemed to be searching for some higher purpose that had eluded them. They reminded me of myself a decade earlier, when I had started my career as an unhappy corporate lawyer. I thought, “Wow, we have a ton of smart people doing the same few things in the same few places.” I imagined what the best use of their talent would be |
| 11-11 | Today 40 percent of American children are born outside of married households, due in large part to the crumbling marriage rate among working-class adults, and overdoses and suicides have overtaken auto accidents as leading causes of death |
| 10-10 | The Obama White House published a report in December 2016 that predicted 83 percent of jobs where people make less than $20 per hour will be subject to automation or replacement. Between 2.2 and 3.1 million car, bus, and truck driving jobs in the United States will be eliminated by the advent of self-driving vehicles |
| 10-10 | Automation has already eliminated about 4 million manufacturing jobs in the United States since 2000. Instead of finding new jobs, a lot of those people left the workforce and didn’t come back. The U.S. labor force participation rate is now at only 62.9 percent, a rate below that of nearly all other industrialized economies and about the same as that of El Salvador and the Ukraine |
| 11-11 | 20 percent of working-age adults are now on disability, with increasing numbers citing mood disorders |
| 23-23 | America is starting 100,000 fewer businesses per year than it was only 12 years ago |
| 24-24 | I was reading a CNN article that detailed how automation had eliminated millions of manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2015, four times more than globalization. |
| 25-25 | The chances that an American born in 1990 will earn more than their parents are down to 50 percent; for Americans born in 1940 the same figure was 92 percent. |
| 26-26 | . The notion they espoused—that a company exists only to maximize its share price—became gospel in business schools and boardrooms around the country. Companies were pushed to adopt shareholder value as their sole measuring stick. Hostile takeovers, shareholder lawsuits, and later activist hedge funds served as prompts to ensure that managers were committed to profitability at all costs. On the flip side, CEOs were |
| 26-26 | goals of large companies began to change in the 1970s and early 1980s. The notion they espoused—that a company exists only to maximize its share price—became gospel in business schools and boardrooms around the country. Companies were pushed to adopt shareholder value as their sole measuring stick. Hostile takeovers, shareholder lawsuits, and later activist hedge funds served as prompts to ensure that managers were committed to profitability at all costs. On the flip side, CEOs were granted stock options for the first time that wedded their individual gain to the company’s share price. The ratio of CEO to worker pay rose from 20 to 1 in 1965 to 271 to 1 in 2016. Benefits were streamlined and reduced and the relationship between company and employee weakened to become more transactional |
| 26-26 | Financial deregulation started under Ronald Reagan in 1980 and culminated in the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 under Bill Clinton that really set the banks loose. The securities industry grew 500 percent as a share of GDP between 1980 and the 2000s while ordinary bank deposits shrank from 70 percent to 50 percent |
| 26-26 | Financial deregulation started under Ronald Reagan in 1980 and culminated in the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 under Bill Clinton that really set the banks loose. The securities industry grew 500 percent as a share of GDP between 1980 and the 2000s while ordinary bank deposits shrank from 70 percent to 50 percent. Financial products multiplied as even Main Street companies were driven to pursue financial engineering to manage their affairs. GE, my dad’s old company and once a beacon of manufacturing, became the fifth biggest financial institution in the country by 2007. |
| 26-26 | With improved technology and new access to global markets, American companies realized they could outsource manufacturing, information technology, and customer service to Chinese and Mexican factories and Indian programmers and call centers. U.S. companies outsourced and offshored 14 million jobs by 2013 |
| 27-27 | The top 1 percent have accrued 52 percent of the real income growth in America since 2009 |
| 27-27 | Studies have shown that everyone is less happy in an unequal society—even those at the top. The wealthy experience higher levels of depression and suspicion in unequal societies; apparently, being high status is easier when you don’t feel bad about it |
| 36-36 | A recent national survey from the online real estate site Trulia found that only 26 percent of people identified their neighborhood as urban, while 53 percent described it as suburban and 21 percent as rural. |
| 40-40 | We tend to use the stock market’s performance as a shorthand indicator of national well-being. However, the median level of stock market investment is close to zero. Only 52 percent of Americans own any stock |
| 73-73 | Voltaire wrote that “Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” The total absence of work is demonstrably a bad thing for most people. Long-term unemployment is presently one of the most destructive things that can happen to a person—happiness levels tank and never recover. One 2010 study by a group of German researchers suggests that it’s worse over time for life satisfaction than the death of a spouse or permanent injury. |
| 74-74 | According to Gallup, only 13 percent of workers worldwide report being engaged with their jobs. The numbers are a little better in America, with 32 percent saying they were engaged with their work in 2015. |
| 75-75 | Whether work is good for humans depends a bit on your point of view. We don’t like it and we’re almost certainly getting too much of it. But we don’t know what to do with ourselves without it. Oscar Wilde wrote, “Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” Unfortunately that may describe the vast majority of us |
| 75-75 | Whether work is good for humans depends a bit on your point of view. We don’t like it and we’re almost certainly getting too much of it. But we don’t know what to do with ourselves without it. Oscar Wilde wrote, “Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” Unfortunately that may describe the vast majority of us. The challenge we must overcome is that humans need work more than work needs us |
| 97-97 | Thousands of young people share the same thirst to achieve that I had—rising out of a combination of family pressures, alienation, and an identity that they’re smart or talented or special or destined to do something significant—all on top of a dread that failure to stay in the winner’s circle leads to an unimaginably dire fate. |
| 98-98 | But more profoundly, there is something deeply wrong if even the winners of the mass scramble to climb into the top of the education meritocracy are so unhappy. They are asking, “What are we striving and struggling for?” No one knows. The answer seems to be “to try to join the tribes in the coastal markets and work your ass off,” even as those opportunities become harder to come by. If you don’t like that answer, there are very few others. |
| 103-103 | I’ve worked with and grown up alongside hundreds of very highly educated people for the past several decades, and trust me when I say that they are not uniformly awesome. People in the bubble think that the world is more orderly than it is. They overplan. They mistake smarts for judgment. They mistake smarts for character. They overvalue credentials. Head not heart. They need status and reassurance. They see risk as a bad thing. They optimize for the wrong things. They think in two years, not 20. They need other bubble people around. They get pissed off when others succeed. They think their smarts should determine their place in the world. They think ideas supersede action. They get agitated if they’re not making clear progress. They’re unhappy. They fear being wrong and looking silly. They don’t like to sell. They talk themselves out of having guts. They worship the market. They worry too much. Bubble people have their pluses and minuses like anyone else. |
| 155-155 | , with the easiest one first. In a future without jobs, people will need to be able to provide for themselves and their basic needs. Eventually, the government will need to intervene in order to prevent widespread squalor, despair, and violence. The sooner the government acts, the more highfunctioning our society will be. The first major change would be to implement a universal basic income |