Recommended Reading
The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy by Michael Foley
Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich
Economic Reappraisal, Then and Now by Benjamin Schwarz in The Atlantic Monthly
Life and Economics are Not the Same by Douglas Rushkoff in Edge
The Tyranny of Expertise in The Australian (also see Management Consultants Run Amuck by Philip D. Broughton in the Wall Street Journal)
Is Everything Bad is Good for You? Plato and Aristotle Consider Video Games by Roger Sandall
You can lead people to knowledge, but you can't make them think (July 2010, Boston.com).
For Your Consideration:
"... if one advances in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he imagined, he will meet with success unimagined in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws expanded and be reinterpreted in his favor in a more liberal light, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as one simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness."
H.D. Thoreau, Walden, Conclusion