A community is made up of intimate relationships among diversified types of individuals--a kinship group, a local group, a neighborhood, a village, a large family.
I'm not a great believer in self-help.
Spend some effort in figuring out why each decision did or did not pan out. Doing that systematically is key: really try to question the way you make decisions, and improve it.
Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family relationships and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time.
Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that.
After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.
Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.
Facebook is massive in scale and scope. Twitter is a public communication forum, but if I'm following you, you're not necessarily following me. LinkedIn is, simply, a professional network.
Landscape to me is a planar thing, just a view. Environment is everything down to the ecosystem. Big difference.
Were we to still be circumcising the hood of the female clitoris, we would not have difficulty considering this a continuation of our tradition to keep girls sexually repressed. America's reflexive continuation of [male] circumcision-without-research reflects the continuation of our tradition to desensitize boys to feelings of pain, to prepare them to question the disposability of their bodies no more than they would question the disposability of their foreskins.
If your neighbor has a completely different view on abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, all of those things, you still are both Americans. Neither one of you is necessarily more patriotic than the other. Neither loves their country any more than the other one does.