Got Me Drove

Today I saw a the following quote on Facebook (accompanied by an image). It was shared 27,000+ times: "I could never cheat on anyone. It’s the type of mistake and wrong doing I couldn’t live with. Knowing that you destroyed someone’s trust is bad, but destroying someone’s perspective on love is far too worse." —Amino Auditore I'm not about to write a piece justifying cheating. In fact, I already wrote about how our tendency to self-decieve and justify immoral behaviour causes us to evade our responsibilities to both ourselves and those we love . Cheaters often rationalize their own cheating and think of themselves as the privileged exception to the rule. They almost never are. What I will do is say this: I think unrealistic, pure notions of romantic love are pervasive and harmful. The desire for pure love is why we feel something irreparably shatters when we have our first fight in a new relationship. Supposedly, pure love is untainted. Pure love is seamless. P...

Dear you, I don’t know who you are, why you are alone at Christmas, or what your loneliness looks like. Loneliness often involves a feeling of absence, and can still be experienced in the company of other people. I’m sorry for whoever or whatever is absent for you. Family. Love. Stability. A potential partner. A parent. A healthy relationship (romantic, familial or otherwise). However you conceive of your loneliness, I hope you find some paradoxical comfort in the idea that you are not alone in how lonely you feel. Comedian Maria Bamford once suggested that if you truly believe you are alone, then you should google the identifiable source of your loneliness. Our feelings and thoughts are almost never as unique and exceptional as we think. Using the internet to find some blog posts or forum threads discussing what you’re going through might not actually be the worst idea right now. Exactly how you process and feel loneliness at Christmas likely depends on whether you’re ...

The way that human beings rationalize their own immoral behaviour to themselves is a never-ending source of fascination. We all make commitments to ourselves and to others in view of the type of people we want to be. These commitments change over time, and we find ways to explain to ourselves how we meet or fail to meet them, or why we have revised them. In other words, we are constantly reconciling our behaviour with our own moral maxims or principles (which we are free to modify). As it is the time of year of New Year's resolutions, typical commitments like eating healthy, abstaining from flirting, cheating or watching pornography, and refraining from drinking alcohol or doing drugs are examples of what I will call "moral maxims," to which we can decide to commit (or not). Let's say I commit to eating healthy in the the upcoming year. While it sounds simple, living up to this maxim is going to require more than a general consideration of what healthy foods are and...