Expert advice is compelling. It promises a shortcut to the 10K requisite hours of practice that “mastery” of anything is supposed to require. Everyone of my generation, when stuck at a crossroads, wants Obi Wan in their head going: “Trust your feelings, Luke.”

But it’s a double-edged lightsaber, isn’t it? 

Every relationship (with bosses, with lovers, with the general public) is a negotiation. We negotiate a sense of an authentic self against the feelings and needs of the other person for the unique benefits the relationship brings us both. It's cold, but it's true. Where we run into trouble, especially in love and work, is when we stop asking ourselves: Is anyone getting a raw deal here?

For no apparent reason, I recently decided to develop five new "positive" habits all at once. I'm on a diet. I go to the gym every day. I don't drink any alcohol, ever. And when I wake up in the morning, before anything else, I write for 20-30 minutes in a journaling app.

How did this happen to me?

Whether you're an artist, or a scientist, or something else, the danger of loving the unknown is that you might fall in love with ignorance. That lands you in the realm of vague, starry-eyed spirituality and boring everyone to death with talk of the amazing energies that surround us. For a songwriter like Conor Oberst or a scientist like Lawrence Krauss, though, the delight is in peering into the unknown, reaching in, and pulling some strange, new thing out of the darkness.

People say that the anonymity of the Internet unleashes people's inner jerk. But I've been struck all my life by how certain some people are, to the point that I'm almost convinced there are two separate kinds of humans. I'll call them Homo Definitus and Homo Curiosis, with the former quite possibly being far more numerous than the latter.

We all go a little crazy when the basic things we feel entitled to, like not getting elbowed in the back or finding a stranger’s armpit in your face at 6:30 a.m., can no longer be taken for granted. We get sick of each other. We suffer compassion fatigue. And this, I think, can have serious consequences.