Category Archives: External Goods

“In praise of negativity”: Now

22 Sunday Feb 2026

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Flourishing, Gratitude, Happiness, Health, Hope, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Pleasure, Politics, Psychology, Work

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I appreciate looking back on my 19-year-old self’s piece in praise of negativity because it highlights most the ways my views have changed since then. It’s not that I assess that specific situation differently: the Vector Marketing (Cutco) approach of getting desperate youth to sell knives to their families is an exploitative business model; working that job was bad and I don’t miss it one bit. But what’s in question is the lessons we draw from that situation.

Yes, we should be clear-eyed enough about the badness of our situations that we have an eye to changing them where possible. But what I didn’t realize then is the lesson of the Serenity Prayer: we also have to accept, and even be positive about, the bad things we cannot change. If we don’t do that – if we decide to see every 50% cup as half-empty – then we are undercutting our own goals.

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In praise of negativity: Then

15 Sunday Feb 2026

Posted by in Economics, External Goods, Happiness, Politics, Work

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This post and the next one will form a “then and now” comparison series. I wrote this present post in the summer of 1995, at age nineteen, in the hope of publishing it on the Facts & Arguments op-ed page of the Globe & Mail. The Globe did not decide to publish the piece, but I remained fond of it for a long time. I still think it is a good piece, but I no longer stand by its claims – and I publish it here now, over thirty years later, for exactly that reason. The question it addresses, of positive and negative attitude, may well be the one on which my views have changed the most in the second half of my life to date – starting when I found Buddhism a few short years after this piece was written. Next time I will publish my current views on the same subject, with what I might hope is the wisdom of the years.

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Mindform Podcast interview

12 Wednesday Nov 2025

Posted by in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, Emotion, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphysics, Mindfulness, Morality, Natural Science, Pleasure, Politics, Psychology, Self

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I was interviewed by Frank Lawton on a recent episode of the Mindform Podcast on self-development and wisdom, associated with Ryan A. Bush’s Designing the Mind. We begin with my formative story in Thailand and the anti-politics associated with it, proceeding to a critique of utilitarianism, a discussion of my gradual movement from Theravāda to Mahāyāna Buddhism, and finally to an exploration of expressive individualism. All told, I think it’s a very nicely rounded introduction to my philosophical thinking – even if my growing hair is in its awkward phase and I stammer a little too much!

We need to see emotions as bodily

16 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Anger, Compassion, Emotion, External Goods, Fear, Health, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Practice, Psychology, Stoicism, Unconscious Mind

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The most important lesson I ever learned was back in Thailand in 1997: that the biggest contributor to my unhappiness wasn’t external problems like being single or unemployed, but my own mental states like craving. Fixing those mental states was a surer path to happiness and reducing suffering.

But the question that has played an ever-increasing role in the three ensuing decades has been: okay, but how? It is one thing to recognize that your craving and anger – or fear or self-pity or shame or other negative emotions – are the main thing keeping you down. It is quite another to do something about them. Our animal natures make those states quite recalcitrant.

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A hymn to Ecclesiastes

26 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by in Aesthetics, Death, Deity, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Judaism, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism

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I don’t remember when I first read the book of Ecclesiastes. I first taught it at the Catholic Stonehill College. There we were free to teach Intro to Religion however we wanted, so to follow my own intellectual curiosity I made it “God in the West”. The one thing we were required to teach was the book of Exodus, which I suspect the department had selected for an uplifting social-justice message in which God acts to free a people from slavery. But the Hebrew Bible, let alone the whole Christian Bible, has never spoken with a single voice, and I selected Ecclesiastes to teach alongside Exodus because the contrast between them is so remarkable.

Much like the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), which it immediately precedes, Ecclesiastes is a book you don’t expect to find in the Bible. It makes you wonder: what is this book doing here? The Song of Songs bears the most obvious contrast with what we think we know about the Bible: here is a text that is obviously about a young couple having sex, seemingly celebrating it, and they don’t even appear to be married. That’s not the sort of thing that we are led to imagine would appear in the Bible. But it’s in there.

Ecclesiastes’s contrast to the rest of the Bible is a little subtler, but it’s still notable. Exodus, and other prophetic books, give you a God who acts in the world with righteousness, freeing his chosen people from slavery with terrifying wonders. Ecclesiastes gives you a God who does not.

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Stoicism for boys, mindfulness for girls?

26 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by in External Goods, Gentleness, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Patient Endurance, Serenity, Stoicism

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The contemporary world is not a particularly philosophical place, the United States even less so. Philosophy’s reputation can be low enough to make it a convenient whipping boy, as when politicians join in a pile-on on it. So it’s a wonderful surprise when a philosophical tradition becomes a trend.

Such is the recent rise of popular Stoicism in the past decade. While it’s particularly influential in Silicon Valley, the modern Stoic movement is popular around the world, with conventions on multiple continents. Stoicism’s message that external goods are not what makes the difference to living well proved a particularly important consolation during the pandemic, when sales of the works of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius surged.

Now a common observation about the newly popular Stoicism is that it appeals primarily to men. I’ve often heard its practitioners dismissed as “tech bros”. An interview by Skye Cleary observed that Stoicon attenders were primarily men, and took this as an occasion for criticism: little surprise, perhaps, in an era that rarely uses the noun “masculinity” without attaching the adjective “toxic”.

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The goods of lay life

13 Sunday Feb 2022

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Family, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Pleasure

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I return today to my correspondence with Justin Whitaker on the Sigālovāda Sutta, taking off from his response to my previous post. The question at issue between us, I think, is what constitutes a good Buddhist life for a layperson or householder, a non-monk. We can get more specific by asking: should the layperson’s life be one that aspires to emulate the monk’s? I don’t think that it should, and I continue to suspect that Justin doesn’t either.

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Frustration where mind meets world

20 Sunday Jun 2021

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Politics

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I find myself repeatedly returning to the question I asked earlier this year: “Is the problem in our heads?” That is: for Buddhists, especially classical ones, is the fundamental human problem located in our minds, or in the world? I have found that my thinking on this question has already changed even just since my posts on the topic last month.

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The courage to change the things we can

06 Sunday Jun 2021

Posted by in Action, Courage, External Goods, Prayer, Protestantism, Serenity

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The Serenity Prayer, it turns out, has multiple versions. On the Alcoholics Anonymous website you’ll find the version I quoted before, though the site adds that the first person is often pluralized, “I” to “we”:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

However, Reinhold Niebuhr’s daughter Elisabeth Sifton in her memoir gives us a different version. She says that Niebuhr’s original version of the prayer was composed in 1943, was first preached by him in a Sunday sermon that year in Heath, Massachusetts, and looked like this:

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

As Sifton notes on pp292-3, there are at least two major differences between these two versions. The first refers to grace and the second does not; the first refers to changing what I or we can change, the second to what should be changed. Sifton prefers the second; she says that AA “simplified” the text and her father “minded” the change but did not object.

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Health, wealth, time, and their purposes

30 Sunday May 2021

Posted by in External Goods, Flourishing, Health, Monasticism, Politics

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Sandro Galea, the dean of BU’s School of Public Health, recently wrote a wonderful (free) Substack post reflecting on the nature of health in the pandemic and post-pandemic era. I’m writing about Galea’s post here because the questions it raises are absolutely philosophical ones.

He closes with the important comment: “we do not live to be healthy—we aspire to be healthy so we can live.” In other circumstances this might seem a truism. But the past fourteen months have made it all too clear how much this needs to be said. For we have all become all too aware of just how much can be given up for the sake of health. Government restrictions already placed major limits on our activity. Most people I know, myself included, limited their activity considerably further than what was required by the government. And most of us also know others whose restrictions went even further than our own. A number of people effectively became voluntary shut-ins, losing all physical contact with the outside world out of fear of a dread disease.

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