Psychology

If you were asked to describe who you are, what would you highlight first?

Compromise is always present in relationships. It may pull us down, but it can also be a good reconciliation exercise when there are differences that cannot be resolved in any other way.

A man is about as big as the things that make him angry – Winston Churchill

In front of the camera, the woman smiles calmly. The dimple on her right cheek, among the wrinkles, shows that Annie has repeated this smile many times in her 81 years of life. Today, however, only her lips are smiling. A strange tension weighs on her eyebrows. Today is the day Annie has decided to die.

"What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare." — from the poem "Leisure" by William H. Davies.

He had played the lottery for years, using the same numbers every time. But on the one day that he forgot to buy a ticket, the draw revealed the winning numbers to be exactly his "lucky" numbers.

Before I started looking for the meaning of life, I thought I had already found it. Or, that it had been given to me. In the world I came from, the road was clearly laid out. My life's major events were all mapped out, and precious little was negotiable.

One of the best-known stories told by ambitious entrepreneurs today is that if you work hard, you will have a lot.

A smooth sea never gave a skilled sailor, said Franklin D. Roosevelt, suggesting that without hardship, challenges and even failures, we cannot become our best selves.

Can you be happily married to anyone? The idea of ​​happiness as a thing of one's own creation persists in our times, although its cultural sedimentation belongs to the modern age.

Over the last few decades, the picture of family life has undergone dramatic changes. The pervasiveness and normalization of divorce are just two of these changes.

There is nothing we can do. Thousands of dreams ended with this short sentence. In the face of too great an obstacle or tragedy, giving up seems the only option left. But there are some people who love what they do so much that nothing stops them from adding an unless. This word breeds the courage and creativity in finding solutions, and then...

Five seconds. And everything smells of heaven, wet grass and happiness.

We are so familiar with complaining that we don't even recognise its presence in our interactions. It has become part of us—and, according to rumours on the internet, so have its consequences. The whining we are told we do every minute of every conversation has the power to destroy our neurons.

In a conversation with Dr. Shelly-Ann Bowen, we discussed her research on what determines whether someone will be active or passive in the face of catastrophic events—fires, floods, or a cancer diagnosis. Social injustice, a lack of self-awareness, and even an immature understanding of faith paralyse action. But there are ways to make positive changes.