My Favorite Things

Is Gratitude Realistic?

David’s Decline and Fall: A fictional short-short story

The Retiree, Episode 13 (final episode): Is the Small Stuff Enough?

On the Spring of My 75th Year

If You Only Stopped to Think…

Cruising, Episode 9: Why Am I Not More Grateful?

Gratitude is Overrated

My Favorite Moments of the Day

From a Park Bench - Day 7: A series of fictional short-short stories

A Word With Marty: "MACHINE"

I'm My Happiest Ever….at 80

Which Suicide Note Should I Leave? A short-short story

Making the Most of Gratitude, Acceptance, and Striving

The life well-led may reduce to balancing gratitude, acceptance, and striving.

Gratitude is important because there’s much to be grateful for that's easily forgotten. Acceptance is important because much is resistant to change. Striving is important because we should be growing and achieving.

To encourage your balancing that triad, list things that you should feel grateful for, are wise to accept, and should strive for.

To prompt your thinking, My Psychology Today article today offers some examples. They're derived from my clients, friends, and me.

Making It Easier to Feel Grateful

Some people try to make others feel gratitude with such reminders as, “People are starving in Africa.”

Alas, too often, that goes in one ear and out the other. Perhaps the bases for gratitude that I describe in my Psychology Today article today will be more helpful.

“You Ungrateful #@#!@!”: Dealing with people's not reciprocating your kindnesses

It feels frustrating to give, give, give, and get little or nothing back. I explore how to cope in my Psychology Today article today.

13 Secular Miracles

Especially in challenging times, taking a moment to appreciate the wondrous can be especially comforting.

Recently, I wrote about what’s probably the ultimate wonderment: birth. Today, my Psychology Today article offers 13 other secular miracles.

Home in the Time of COVID: Appreciating and easily improving your home

Previous installments in this series offered thoughts on how to make the most of pleasures that remain allowable amid the COVID lockdown: walking, reading, music, and eating. In my Psychology Today article today, we turn to home.

Many of us are staying at home more amid the COVID lockdown. While that may cause cabin fever, it also may afford us the  opportunity to appreciate and improve our home without undue cost, which in the economic shutdown may be more important than ever.

Externalities An under-considered factor in how we turn out?

Today, ever more of us is attributed to genes, from intelligence to behavioral flexibility, from self-control to political leaning.


But might our mindset’s pendulum have swung too far? Might we be underestimating the influences of environment or, to use the current argot, externalities?

To make that case, and hopefully to enhance your sense of gratitude and contentment, my PsychologyToday.com article today asks you to imagine if you were affected by any of 23 externalities.

Successful and Still Unhappy: 3 possibly easy fixes

Many of my clients are financially successful yet still unhappy. I’ve offered tips on this previously, for example, Wealthy but Sad Syndrome. But some people learn more when the tips are embedded in context, hence, as my PsychologyToday.com article today, I offer a story.