1、    I don’t think that there is anything massively disruptive about this shifting sense of community. The continuing search for connection and shared enterprise is very human. But I do feel uncomfortable with our shifting identity. The balance has tipped, and we seem increasingly dependent on work for our sense of self.
If our offices are our new neighborhoods, if our professional titles are our new ethnic tags, then how do we separate ourselves from our jobs? Selfworth isn’t just something to measure in the marketplace. But in these new communities, it becomes harder to tell who we are without saying what we do.
    2、Onward and upward was the course she set. Small progress was no excuse for feeling satisfied with yourself. People who stopped to pat themselves on the back didn’t last long. Even if you got to the top, you’d better not take it easy. “The bigger they come, the harder they fall” was one of her favorite maxims.
It wasn’t the gin that was shouting. It was my mother. The gin only gave me the courage to announce to them that yes, by God, I had always believed in success, had
always believed that without hard work and self-discipline you could never amount to anything, and didn’t deserve to
3、With no idea what to do next, I resolved literally to “sail off into the sunset,” following the coastline from Connecticut to Florida. But somewhere off New Jersey I turned due east, straight out to sea. Hours later, I climbed up on the stern rail and watched the dark Atlantic slip beneath the hull. How easy it would be to let the water take me, I thought.
Everyone, at some point, will suffer a loss — the loss of loved ones, good health, a job. “It’s your ‘desert experience’ — a time of feeling barren of options, even hope,” explains Patrick Del Zoppo, a psychologist and bereavement specialist with the Archdiocese of New York. “The important thing is not to allow yourself to be stranded in the desert.”
4、Happiness is never more than partial. There are no pure states of mankind. Whatever else happiness may be, it is neither in having nor in being, but in becomin
strcmp was not declared ing. What the Founding Fathers declared for us as an inherent right, we should do well to remember, was not happiness but the pursuit of happiness. What they might have underlined, could they have foreseen the happiness market, is the cardinal fact that happiness is in the pursuit itself, in the meaningful pursuit of what is life-engaging and life-revealing, which is to say, in the idea of becoming. A nation is not measured by what it possesses or wants to possess, but by what it wants to become.
By all means let the happiness-market sell us minor satisfactions and even minor follies so long as we keep them in scale and buy them out of spiritual change. I am no customer for either Puritanism or asceticism. But drop any real spiritual capital at those bazaars, and what you come home to will be your own poorhouse.
6、What they should say is “Don’t be afraid to fail!” Failure isn’t fatal. Countless people have had a bout with it and come out stronger as a result. Many have even come out famous. History is strewn with eminent dropouts, “loners” who followed their own trail, not worrying about its odd twists and turns because they had faith in
their own sense of direction. To read their biographies is always exhilarating, not only because they beat the system, but because their system was better than the one that they beat.
Who is to say, then, if there is any right path to the top, or even to say what the top consists of? Obviously the colleges don’t have more than a partial answer — otherwise the young would not be so disaffected with an education that they consider vapid. Obviously business does not have the answer — otherwise the young would not be so scornful of its call to be an organization man.
7、Fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation. It is the leading cause of the decline in the well-being of children. It is also the engine driving our most urgent social problems, from crime to adolescent pregnancy to domestic violence. Yet, despite its scale and social consequences, fatherlessness is frequently ignored or denied. Especially within our elite discourse, it remains a problem with no name.
Surely a crisis of this scale merits a name and a response. At a minimum, it requires a serious debate: Why is fatherhood declining? What can be done about it? Can our society find ways to invigorate effective fatherhood as a norm of male behavior? Yet, to date, our public discussion has been remarkably weak and defeatist. There is a prevailing belief that not much can or even should be done to reverse the trend.

版权声明：本站内容均来自互联网，仅供演示用，请勿用于商业和其他非法用途。如果侵犯了您的权益请与我们联系QQ:729038198，我们将在24小时内删除。