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The romantic person instinctively sees marriage in terms of emotions, but what a couple actually gets up to together over a lifetime has much more in ...more

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Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just give us the money'.

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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

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It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their wor...more

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A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.

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Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.

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The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevatin...more

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We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling th...more

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Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to insti...more

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as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

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Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea th...more

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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wi...more

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The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

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When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourse...more

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...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are ...more