The question, "To whom are you beholden?" comes from The Art of Living, a translation of Epictetus' Enchiridion by Sharon Lebell. Here is the full passage:

 "You are not an isolated entity, but a unique, irreplaceable part of the cosmos. Don't forget this. You are an essential piece of the puzzle of humanity. Each of us is a part of a vast, intricate, and perfectly ordered human community. But where do you fit into this web of humanity? To whom are you beholden?"

Listen to this newsletter as podcast. We're on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

We all walk around in these bubbles of awesomeness.

But the truth of life is that it can be quite brutal. 

But then again, everything is relative.

And the worst brutality you've ever experienced is, regardless of how it rates on someone else's scale, still the worst brutality you've ever experienced.

It's easy to be a villain... To take all that the world has dumped on you, however relatively heavy or light it is, and dump it right back on the person next to you.

It's so easy to be nasty and treat people like they're less than because they're different. We're all different. You can always find some reason to "other" people if you look.

It's so easy to only protect the people who fit your small definition of human... Likely people who look like you and talk like you and do things like you.

Courage, real courage, is loving. Because the world is brutal, and because loving is hard and because loving opens you up to more brutality.

How does this relate to getting the most out of your weeks? I had a person unsubscribe last week with a note that she didn't like the politics in last week's newsletter. I couldn't find much that was political... but I want to be explicit.

There is only so much joy you can squeeze out of a week when you are focused solely on yourself. It's weird that that sentence seems political these days.

Sure, you can maximize the self actualization, make sure you are taking all of your supplements, doing all your meditation, lifting all your weights, and being fully present in every moment with yourself, etc. etc. etc.

But all of the best and only reasons to wake up tomorrow are walking around with squishy insides, and with a whole lot of their own attempts at self actualization going on. It is the meeting of the two that make doing all that worthwhile.

I can be a pretty autonomous person. I spend most days mostly by myself, doing work that I have laid out for myself, at a pace I dictate. It is pretty fulfilling... as long as there are people to go home to.

Once you can be content with your internal life, all of the remaining joy is created by collisions with other humans, and the bigger the network and deeper the connections, the larger the potential.

And it has to follow, if your hopes and dreams are important to you, that their hopes and dreams must be important to them.

It seems so simple to understand that other people have hopes and dreams too. You want to be REALLY happy?  Help them achieve those hopes and dreams.