Alyssa Luboff, PhD

An old college friend once posted, “I’m from the middle of the country, and my political views are exactly the same—they fall right in the middle.” It was a tense election season, and I, swept up in the rhetoric of one side, could not relate. Didn’t the middle mean that you were only half right? And worse, that you were also half wrong?

If you tell me there is another side, opposite yours, I will believe you. There are so many ways – right and left, up and down, diagonal zig-zag and spiraling across all the sides of this 360-world we live in. It is important to see, to acknowledge all of them. If you tell me that other side is

I often hear people diminish their own suffering with phrases like: It’s just first-world problems. I have it so much easier than other people. It’s no big deal. I really have no right to complain. Sometimes we say these things because we’re trying to remind ourselves to be grateful for what we do have. Sometimes it’s because we’re ashamed of our own needs and of our own vulnerability. Sometimes it’s because we’re afraid to let ourselves feel what’s really going on.

Why can’t we afford another shutdown? The economy, the elections…So we force sick employees back into the workplace and traumatized students back into the schoolhouse…What about the workers whose personal lives fall apart under the stress? What about the drop in the labor force when so many are forced into early retirement? What about the mild cases that lead to permanent disability? What about those already too weak to fight off another round? Why can’t we slow down?

About a decade ago, while surfing the Internet, I stumbled on a page written by someone who suffers from panic disorder. She was offering a course on how to overcome anxiety. I read her descriptions of not being able to leave her apartment with a complete lack of understanding. What was so hard about going up and down the stairs? Why did normal, everyday activities fill her with fear? Was she just failing to control small worries before they got out of hand?

Here’s a variation on a familiar saying: Life is what happens while you’re trying to get your work done. For many of us, balancing the demands of work and relationships feels impossible. These can be relationships with parents, partners, children, friends, and also ourselves. What we need to do to make a living feels at odds with the art of living itself—that is, the art of cultivating healthy connection with ourselves and others.

I don’t like the word “privilege.” It connotes the idea of something better, something earned; and whiteness is neither. But the phrase #whiteprivilege has proved useful in explaining the differences in daily experience between people who are white and people of color. This is an essay I wrote several years ago under the title, “Why I Don’t Want to Be Colorblind.” Perhaps another title could have been, “Why We Don’t Need to Be Chanting, ‘All Lives Matter’ Right Now.” It’s the

As our world grinds to a halt – Flights canceled, production stopped, commutes erased – Our planet, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, Reverses the flow and begins to breathe. She is healing, shedding, transforming. And this virus, ironically, attacks the human lungs. We gasp for air. What do we do now? Are we doomed? How do we breathe?

“You’re one of us,” Nelson said. I looked at my friend, equally surprised by the compliment and bewildered by the spin of his words. I had accepted the epithet, “gringa,” long ago; I knew I wasn’t really one of the Afro-descendant or Indigenous Chachi people, the two ancestral groups living in that region of the Ecuadorian rainforest. But I loved them, and I loved the Chocó, that coastal forest wedged between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. It broke my heart every

This picture is from 2004, the year our middle child was born. I am looking forward, and I am looking back. That is the essence of so much of my work: looking forward and looking back. What essential pieces of our humanity have we lost moving forward, and how do we recover them? How do we reconstruct them in new ways, in this society, in this lifetime?

The other day a reader on Facebook contacted me. He wanted to get a professional philosopher’s take on a question. “What do you think…,” he asked, “of the meaning of existence?” “Well, that’s a big question,” I could hear my own advisor answering in my head. In academic philosophy, we are trained to be very careful and precise in our thinking. It’s a great skill, but sometimes it gets in the way of really engaging with life.