we are animated by an intense connection to the landscapes and topographies of our formative years. An emotion known as topophilia, which I experienc… - Maria Popova

Some of our dormant multitudes come awake with a catlike stretch, slowly and lazily over years of personal development. Others leap into being with the jolt of an alarm sounded by a particular event or person who has entered our lives at a particular moment — rarely anticipated, almost never convenient, always transformational. On those rare, momentous mornings, one looks into the bathroom mirror and greets — sometimes grudgingly, sometimes gleefully — the gladsome stranger of oneself.

I would almost dare to say that the sickness is perhaps a very real and very dreadful hatred of life as such, of course subconscious, buried under our pitiful and superficial optimism about ourselves and our affluent society. But I think that the very thought processes of materialistic affluence (and here the same things are found in all the different economic systems that seek affluence for its own sake) are ultimately self-defeating. They contain so many built-in frustrations that they inevitably lead us to despair in the midst of “plenty” and “happiness” and the awful fruit of this despair is indiscriminate, irresponsible destructiveness, hatred of life, carried on in the name of life itself. In order to “survive” we instinctively destroy that on which our survival depends….Technics and wisdom are not by any means opposed. On the contrary, the duty of our age, the “vocation” of modern man is to unite them in a supreme humility which will result in a totally self-forgetful creativity and service.

Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, [cynicism] is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive.