911? Did Kara Texted Alex 911 Because Lena Is In Her Apartment? Homegirl Be Nervous Of Her Girl, Huh?

Here’s one of the most personally meaningful comics from my new book “The Shape of Ideas: An Illustrated Exploration of Creativity.” In my creative life, I frequently lose sight of why I make the work - for the sheer joy of the process. Everything else is extra.

I hope my book gives you guidance in creativity and life! It’s published by Abrams ComicArts, and you can get it here: 

http://www.abramsbooks.com/shapeofideas

Hangman is a great game because it teaches you that saying the wrong things could ends someone’s life.

Saying “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is a good argument for why there should be stricter gun laws…because people kill people.

by Mr. Lovenstein

Reblog In 5 seconds for good luck

I hope you find someone who knows how to love you when you are sad.

Nikita Gill (via quotemadness)

Eudaimonia vs Happiness

Eudaimonia is an Ancient Greek word, particularly emphasised by the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, that deserves wider currency because it perfectly corrects the shortfalls in one of the most central but troubling terms in our contemporary idiom: happiness.

When we nowadays try to articulate the purpose of our lives, we commonly have recourse to the word happiness. We tell ourselves and others that the ultimate rationale for our jobs, our relationships and the conduct of our day to day lives is the pursuit of happiness. It sounds like an innocent and pleasant enough idea, but excessive reliance on the term means that we are frequently unfairly tempted to exit or at least heavily question a great many testing but worthwhile situations.

The Ancient Greeks resolutely did not believe that the purpose of life was to be happy; they proposed that it was to achieve Eudaimonia, a word which has been best translated as ‘fulfilment’.

What distinguishes happiness from fulfilment is pain. It is eminently possible to be fulfilled and - at the same time - under pressure, suffering physically or mentally, overburdened and, quite frequently, in a rather tetchy mood. This is a psychological nuance that the word happiness makes it hard to capture; for it is tricky to speak of being happy yet unhappy or happy yet suffering. However, such a combination is readily accommodated within the dignified and noble-sounding idea of Eudaimonia.

The word encourages us to trust that many of life’s most worthwhile projects will at points be quite at odds with contentment and yet are worth pursuing nevertheless. Properly exploring our professional talents, managing a household, keeping a relationship going, creating a new business venture or work of art… none of these lofty goals will probably leave us cheerful and grinning on a quotidian basis. They will, in fact, involve us in all manner of challenges that exhaust and ennervate us. And yet we will perhaps, at the end of our lives, still feel that these tasks were worth undertaking. We’ll have sampled something deeper and more interesting than happiness.

With the word Eudaimonia in mind, we can stop imagining that we are aiming for a pain-free existence - and then berating ourselves unfairly for being in a bad mood. We’ll know that we are trying to do something far more important than smile, that we are striving to do justice to our full human potential.

Boring boyfriend. Pffft 🤣

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