Posts by pwsadmin

I’ve been writing for a long, long time – many years. And there have been times when I’ve experienced writer’s block – many times. But lately I’m undergoing a new kind of obstruction, a kind of ennui born of futility. The more I study the world, the more I examine people, the more convinced I…

I used to think that optimists were overly positive, putting a spin on reality to make it conform to their sunny dispositions. That used to frustrate me. At times, it still does. For example, when the boss tells you to improve your attitude and be a positive person at meetings rather than pointing out the…

Many of the things we do, in the hopes of achieving a particular result, come back to surprise us with unintended consequences. Sometimes those consequences are negative, sometimes positive, and sometimes so strange we find it difficult to believe there’s even a connection. It’s great when those unexpected consequences are positive – like with the…

People have been telling stories for almost as long as there have been people. Sometimes those stories have been told through art, as in the cave paintings found in Asia and Europe. Sometimes music has served as the medium and, before written language appeared, music assisted in transferring knowledge from one generation to the next.…

The world is complicated – that’s hardly news. But it’s important to recognize that fact because our brains don’t like a complicated world. They want a world that makes sense, a world that follows patterns we’re capable of understanding. This is why we discriminate and stereotype and generalize all the time. We witness a new…

We all know that desire is the longing for a person, thing or state of mind – and most of us call it an emotion, although psychologists tend to differentiate it from emotion, asserting that it arises from bodily structures or functions. However, we don’t need to get into technicalities in definitional terms to understand…

Being out of work for a couple months (or possibly longer – not sure when I’ll be going back) is a strange experience for me. I always knew my job as a writer wasn’t essential, however valuable it is. Sure, I can entertain and enlighten readers, but I’m not putting bread on their tables. I’m…

We tend not to believe things we don’t want to believe. For example, most of us believe that when this first wave of the novel coronavirus passes, we’ll be through the worst of it. Of course, we don’t know if that’s true, but that’s what most of us want to believe. Yes, many doctors say…

People talk about wanting to get back to normal but going about business as normal is part of what got us to this point. We delayed the proper response in order to keep our economy going normally and now we’re paying the price. Already we’re getting pressure from our government to get back to normal,…

Getting married, having children, landing a better job: contrary to popular belief, these don’t guarantee happiness. They can produce a temporary high, but over the course of years, they don’t tend to produce happier people. Happiness, however, can be learned. Studies have shown that there are multiple ways to make ourselves happier. Most of them…