TL;DR is a monthly digest summarizing the vital bits from the previous month's How to Live newsletter so you don't miss a thing.

Here’s everything from APRIL—the free essays you might have missed and what paid subscribers got behind the paywall.

The questions are everywhere now. They show up on first dates and in magazine columns and on laminated cards at dinner parties. Someone usually frames them as a secret potion, an ancient code: answer these thirty-six questions with a stranger, and you might fall in love.

Many of us yearn for such a recipe, a secret set of life instructions that might produce, on demand, our desired outcome.

But the study that gave us these 36 questions was not about love, at least not the way it’s been marketed to us.

The question behind it all was this: can intimacy be created on purpose, between strangers, in a laboratory?

At the time, the early 90s, this ran against a deeply held assumption. Namely that closeness is organic, unpredictable, and grows over time. You meet, you talk, you circle each other. You disclose a little, then a little more. Trust accumulates in the space between you, drawing you inevitably closer until you sense a gravitational force holding you two alone together, in orbit.

Arthur Aron, a social psychologist in his mid-forties at Stony Brook University in New York, wondered if the process was less mysterious than it felt.

📌 This essay is for paid subscribers.

On January 1, 1965, the Reader’s Digest Association published an anthology of previously published essays dedicated to the challenge of existence, what they so aptly call “the most difficult of all the arts.”

The book How to Live With Life contains the collective wisdom, insights, and experience of those who, according to the introduction, have “lived deeply, thought profoundly, and cared enormously about sharing with others what they have learned.“

From “housewives” to psychiatrists, this nearly 600-page book abounds with gems that have withstood the sands of time, with many problematic clunkers best relegated to the dustbins of the past.

Divided into sections about how we live—with people, ourselves, reality, purpose, wisdom, and destiny—each area of struggle is meted out among the great thinkers and doers of the time, with essays from actor Danny Kaye to The Power of Positive Thinking author Norman Vincent Peale.

However, perhaps the most timely and fascinating comes from American marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson.

A cursory glance at any social media comment thread will reveal a fundamental truth about humans: we are an inflexible bunch.

We cleave to our beliefs and mistake our perspective for fact. We push back against anything that counters our view, getting angry and lashing out at others for being "stupid" because they don't know or believe what we do.

Most of us fall victim to this. I know I do. But when I reflect on the ways I've changed throughout my life, there's one through-line: flexibility.

The key to change is flexibility.

We must be able to challenge who we are, what we think, and why we think it, as often as possible. The biggest shifts in thinking and behavior often begin with the simplest questions. But to answer them, we must be willing to be wrong, to know what we don't want to know, to sit with the discomfort of living, or else we'll remain stuck.

But which questions do we ask? How do we challenge ourselves, and when?

Any time someone holds a different point of view, we should ask ourselves what we aren't understanding that they understand, even if what they understand is morally indefensible. So many of us don't realize we're following narratives we've been handed rather than ones we've examined and chosen. But in order to choose what to believe, we need to understand the where, why, and how behind the beliefs we claim to stand by.

The psychologist Carol Dweck discovered, through studying fifth graders, that there are essentially two kinds of people: those with a fixed mindset and those with a growth mindset. Those with a fixed mindset remain, well, fixed. Those with a growth mindset are always stretching and learning. Thankfully, we can practice becoming the second kind.

Here are four questions to help you practice flexibility of mind.

📌 This essay is for paid subscribers.

I vowed not to bring new books into my home until I read all the ones I already have. I failed. Below, I’m sharing the things I’m watching, reading, listening to and thinking about that I love and think you might too.

Watching

Movie

Peter Hujar’s Day by Ira Sachs

On December 18, 1974, Linda Rosenkrantz asked her friend Peter Hujar to write down everything he did one day. Hujar met Rosenkrantz at her apartment on 94th street the following day where she asked him about it in detail. She tape-recorded their conversation. Those tapes were recently rediscovered and made into a movie by Ira Sachs and a book by Stephen Koch and the Peter Hujar Estate.

I am savoring this movie. I’m watching it in snatches—it’s that satisfying.

You can find this on the Criterion Channel

(Here’s a link to the book)

Welcome to the Friday Drop for paid subscribers!

Here, I’ll introduce one thing from the past or present that has my attention, and generates enough curiosity in me that I think, I have to share this with others.

While I’ll aim for every Friday, I can’t guarantee I’ll succeed, but I’ll do the best I can.

Hope you enjoy this first Friday drop, which hails from Britain…

📌 This essay is for paid subscribers.

Perfectionism can rise from overcompensating out of a fear that you’re not good enough and the fear of failing. To be anxious is to be hypervigilant and attuned to tonal shifts and signals—anything that might suggest you’re being judged and your score is coming in low.

People who suffer from chronic anxiety worry they are not acceptable as they are and that the only way to be embraced by others is to be perfect. The effort to be perfect is just one maladaptive way people deal with their anxiety.

When you suffer from anxiety, you feel defective, as though you’re missing crucial parts that other people have. You grasp onto the stories your worry narrates, convincing you that they’re true.

You feel your feelings so strongly you confuse them for facts.

Because anxious people feel flawed, they worry everyone else can see their flaws, and the threat of exposure feels so shameful, it drives many anxious people to create a veneer of perfection so that everyone will be thrown off course. It’s a defense mechanism.

Anxiety can disguise itself in a variety of ways and perfectionism is just one of them.

But, perfectionism can also disguise itself.

Below are 6 common hiding places for anxiety-motivated perfectionism:

📌 This essay is for paid subscribers.

Until next week, I will remain,