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Before you misunderstood yourself, someone else misunderstood you first. It’s in this gap, between your experience of yourself and someone else’s interpretation of you, that many of us spend our lives. Trying to understand why we do what we do—using explanations that never quite fit.
How to Live is an attempt to make visible the structures through which a life becomes misread. An ongoing inquiry into the distance between who we are and who we’re told to be.

Amanda Stern is the author of thirteen books and the creator of the How to Live Newsletter, read by 13,000+ subscribers. She writes about psychology, philosophy, and the invisible forces shaping our interior lives. She also created Kinesthetic Realism, a method for writers who struggle to translate emotion onto the page.
“So many of us live our lives avoiding our feelings of fear, as though our feelings exist outside of us. What we overlook is that we can only fear a feeling that we’ve already felt. And if we’ve already felt it, then we have our evidence that we can survive the thing we’re convinced will destroy us.”
-The How to Live Newsletter
Every week, author Amanda Stern draws on psychology, philosophy, and the history of the mind to find language for the forces shaping your interior life.
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