To excel or to have fun? That is the question. I was recently having a conversation with a young man about his passion in certain sports. As we talked further it became very evident that he would only engage in activities in which he excelled. I inquired why that was so and he seemed taken aback by my question. It was nonsensical to him to play at a sport with which he wasn't superlative. His protested, "what would be the point?" "To have fun
The Pathologizing of a Culture A young woman in her mid-twenties recently came in for her first visit with me. Three months earlier she had experienced her first bout of anxiety and it had become more acute thereafter. She went on to explain that she had been seeing a psychiatrist who had prescribed four different psychotropic medications, simultaneously. Complaining of a blurred and disconnected feeling, she offered that she
Why New Year's Resolutions Tend to Fail and How We Can Achieve Them Year after year, so many people make New Year's resolutions that over time wither and fade into another failed attempt to transform some aspect of their lives. What begins with a hopeful optimism unravels in yet another unmet aspiration. It's always a curiosity to me how we come to try to evoke change in the same way that gives us the same failure. I imagine that if we conducted a survey six mont
The Paradox of Expectations  Beginning a new year often brings forth a review of our expectations and I thought it might be a good idea to briefly examine this topic. As with many concepts in our culture, we tend to fall well short of fully appreciating what these terms truly suggest and at times, the apparent contradictions that they may evoke. This is certainly the case with the word expectations. Are they to be valued a
Looking at Greed as an Addictive Dysfunction The saga of the Bernard Madoff debacle actually reveals a terrible dysfunction in our culture, which has now come screechingly to our attention. We are a society that is addicted to and ultimately maddened by our obsession of more and more. How inconceivable is it that a man who has attained so much success and wealth and earned the rewards of privilege and prestige, feels compelled to ruin himse
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