The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

The limit of studies

But this is like a danger and a trap–kind of living off of an abstract. A lot of things in small studies don’t actually translate to the real world […] You can’t underestimate the value of, like, personal experience when that vastly outnumbers the small study that is available.

– Dr. Maxfield

Dr. Maxfield and Dr. Shah talk more about their experiences with treating hundreds of patients and the results they get versus the results smaller scale laboratory-limited studies get in the linked video above. It helps illustrate how studies should not be the sole results to consider when doing personal research. It’s tempting to completely dismiss personal anecdotes altogether in favor of scientific studies, but this overlooks the limits that scientific studies are often prey to.

A great man doesn’t seek to lead. He’s called to it. And he answers. And if your answer is no, you’ll still be the only thing I ever needed you to be. My son.

– Duke Leto Atreides I, Dune (2021)

It is a tragedy, perhaps, that human beings can get so much energy and enthusiasm from hate. If you want to feel ten feet tall and as though you could run a hundred miles without stopping, hate beats pure cocaine any day.

— Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?

L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
What is essential is invisible to the eye.

Ce qui est tellement joli n’est pas pour les yeux.
Something that lovely is not for the eyes.

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.

– part of a letter from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to Natalie Paley