Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘One of the reasons that countries like Denmark are happy is because they have social safety nets. It’s one of the reasons people can pick careers that they like. You’re taxed so heavily that it doesn’t pay to be a finance bro, so you’re like, Well, I might as well be an artist if I want to be an artist. The lack of income inequality means people have an excuse to follow their purpose, which can allow people to feel like their life is better. Those structural things matter a lot.

I get in trouble sometimes for talking about so many of these individual solutions — engage in social connection or write in a gratitude journal or meditate. And people think, Don’t we also have to have a social safety net? Yeah, of course. All these individual things that I’m suggesting are supposed to complement, not substitute for the stuff that we should really be doing.

But another thing we know about individual action is that it just makes us more productive. It gives us emotional bandwidth. I think people mistakenly think that these individual strategies sometimes build up the resilience you need to put up with being in a bad society. But I think the real goal is to give you the resilience to fight the bad society.’ (from the New York Times)