Love and commitments are so often only connected to romantic relationships, but they are also deep elements of friendships, our family of choice.

There are people who celebrate their 50th alone, way too many people. You should learn to savour this gift of friendship and show them your appreciation. Say more.

بخشی از تصوری که دیگران از ما دارن، وابسته به آدم‌هایی هست که باهاشون در ارتباط هستیم و قسمتی از ما با اون‌ها تعریف می‌شه. باید از دایره‌ی ارتباطی مراقبت کرد؛ مهم‌ه که رفت‌و‌آمد آدم با چه کسی باشه و آگاهانه به این قسمت توجه کنیم.

“Every couple has to negotiate separateness and togetherness. It's probably one of the core tasks of a relationship. What is "I" and what is "we"?
But as we all need connection and independence, what sometimes happen in a relationship is one person is afraid to lose the other and the other person is afraid to lose themselves.”

What is initially attractive because it's different, is also the source of conflict later because it's different.

The balance between connection and closeness, and freedom and independence, is a primary task of relationships.

If we're dating, I want to be your second priority. I want your first priority to be you, your ambitions, your life and your future; because my priority right now is me and mine.

توی یک سال اخیر در جریان جزئیاتی از زندگی آدم‌هایی که به نوعی برام تحسین‌برانگیز بودن قرار گرفتم که برای بار هزارم به خودم می‌گم حسرت زندگی هیچ‌کس رو نخور.

To want to be a good friend, you have to try and put in the effort.

Being vulnerable goes both ways; it allows you to be there for someone and it also allows someone to be there for you. If you're always bottled up and not sharing anything about yourself, it's hard for your friends to be there for you. Because they don’t know how and they don’t really know what you're going through.

Vulnerability without boundaries leads to disconnection, distrust and disagreement.

The more isn’t always the better.

Boredom is both a warning that we're not doing what we wanna be doing and a push that motivates us to switch goals and projects.

It's not just about doing nothing, it's about being left to our thoughts with media telling us how to feel and not reaching for a distraction every time we need to feel the silence.

The telegraph may have made the country into "one neighbourhood", but it was populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other. Everything became everyone's business and we were sent information which answered no question we had asked. Intelligence becomes equated with knowing "lots of" things rather than knowing "about" things.

Our brains have not evolved to deal with these devices. Because we're having constant dopamine hits from our phone, the novel aspects of our day-to-day life becomes less exciting.

It is when you're alone with your thoughts that you can take those experiences you're having in your life and fit them into a framework. It is when you can reflect on yourself, what's going or not going well and make progress in your identity and your self-definition.

It's not good for us to be given daily this inflated sense of self-importance. You don’t want this. You want real sense of importance made from doing real things on behalf of real people that really matters. "I have the respect of this person because over time I've been there when they needed me."

You get a calibrated sense of self-importance which pushes you to actually do things of real importance to live a more sustainable deeper life. But these things get subverted when you allow these manipulated metrics and numbers next to icons on an app on your phone tell you whether you’re influential or not.

The internet and phones have seriously diminished human attention spans to the point that we now expect almost immediate gratification for performing tasks. And when a book gets a bit boring, or playing an instrument is tough, or we get stuck alone with our own thoughts (god forbid), we switch to doing something mediocre online rather than preserving with something difficult in the real world.

You realize that for a very long time now, you've been sacrificing productive time or just an hour to have a think about your life for the sake of watching something you don't really give a shit about, out of fear of being bored.

Social media is setting goals in my life that I never really wanted. When I was there, I felt that my grades were not good enough, I wasn't doing enough with my life, I'm not dressed well enough or I'm not going to good enough holidays or restaurants.

You gotta do something that's hard. The key is to be between the levels of frustrating but achievable.