#meg jay

It takes time to build a good life.

"Things get better only when we let new and better people in. Things get better when we let new and better people care about us or love us, or when we at least listen to - and believe - what they have to say."

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain. You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today. And then one day you find, ten years has got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

The problem with feeling distant from the future is that distance leads to abstraction, and abstraction leads to distance, and round and round it goes. The further away love and work seem, the less we need to think about them; the less we think about love and work, the further away they feel. I started to sketch out a timeline to bring the future closer and to make Rachel’s thinking more concrete.

One of the most poignant differences, at least to the powerless, is that those in power are free to be themselves. They can feel what they feel and want what they want. They can be spontaneous and make choices largely without fear. They can be consistent inside and out. The powerless find it prudent to hide their true feelings and wishes—especially if they are not happy, easy ones. Little Orphan Annie herself sang that “you’re never fully dressed without a smile.” But smiling means different things for different people, depending in part on how much power they have. Research shows us that, for high-power individuals, smiles on their faces correspond with internal states of pleasure or happiness, while low-power individuals smile to make other people comfortable; there is no correlation between their smiles and how they really feel inside. For the powerful, smiling is authentic, while for the powerless, it is strategic or obligatory. Those high in power smile when they want to while those low in power smile when they need to.

"There is a certain terror that goes along with saying 'My life is up to me.' It is scary to realize that you can't just wait around, that no one can really rescue you, and that you - and only you - just have to do something."

"The one thing I have learned is that you can't think your way through life. The only way to figure out what to do is to do - something."