So spot on. I love this piece. It's a good call on the sum total of our lives being people, not your efforts or ticked off boxes to better yourself. We really are no good alone.

Excellent. I am trying to spend as much of my life as possible on the practice of love. Love is everything. It is by far the most essential teaching of the Bible: Love one another. Jesus says it again and again and again. He even goes so far as to say that pretty much nothing else matters.

This article is very “now,” very young and hip. In that way, it’s very different from reading the Bible. Perhaps that’s why it intrigued me so. A fresh perspective that makes primordial truth seem new again is great (real, deep) stuff.

I love this piece so so so much.

People, on the other hand, challenge us. They infuse our life with stakes. You can hurt a friend or partner or lose them forever if you refuse vulnerability or reject growth — the same cannot be said of a therapist, for instance, which makes them far safer companions. Therapy, while genuinely beneficial in many forms, has started to become homogenized in the personal-wellness zeitgeist as a kind of resume-builder for the self; a box to check off on the way towards becoming a hyper-functional young professional in life and love.

These were sad and difficult times in which we all learned that it is often impossible for us as individuals to save someone we love from the sum of their suffering, especially so when you’re ignoring your own needs in the process. But to extrapolate that reality into the idea that we shouldn’t want to tend to our loved ones, to receive them as flawed and imperfect people and care for them anyway, is a grave miscorrection. We all exist to save each other. There is barely anything else worth living for.