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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 238 (Jun 7, 2026) — Subtraction, Flunking Life, Human Behavior, & More
The Sloww Sunday newsletter sends to 10,000+ readers slowing down to the wisdom within. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding this newsletter to others.
New to Sloww? Here’s what it’s about in a nutshell (which mirrors the newsletter sections below):
💯 Are you winning on paper but losing at life?
“I made straight A’s and flunked ordinary living.” — Walker Percy
Source: The Second Coming
0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
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➖ What in your life can you successfully subtract?
“Here is the secret to subtraction. It doesn’t matter what you remove. What matters is that you stop adding it back.” — Erin Loechner
Source: Chasing Slow (Book Summary)
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
😃 Featured Product: The Hierarchy of Happiness: 100+ Powerful Perspectives on How to be Happy (Free eBook)
🥇 Are you honestly being all you can be?
“If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.” — Abraham Maslow
Source: The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (Book Summary)
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
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🧠 Have you considered that all human behavior is part of the natural order?
“Human behavior—its ups and its downs—is no different in principle from the behavior of the clouds, or of the wind, or of dancing flames in the fireplace. As you watch the pattern of the dancing flames they never do anything vulgar. Their artistry is always perfect. Ultimately, it is the same with human beings. We are just as much a part of the natural order as flames in the fire or stars in the sky.” — Alan Watts
Source: You’re It!
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
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☯️ Self or no-self? What about both?
“You have to be somebody before you can be nobody. The issue in personal development as I have come to understand it is not self or no-self, but self and no-self. Both a sense of self and insight into the ultimate illusoriness of its apparent continuity and substantiality are necessary achievements … The attempt to (spiritually) bypass the developmental tasks of identity formation and object constancy through a misguided spiritual attempt to ‘annihilate the ego’ has fateful and pathological consequences … The one tradition (psychodynamic thought) has emphasized the importance of becoming somebody; the other (Buddhist thought), the importance of becoming nobody. As I have come to understand it as a psychologist in both traditions, both a sense of self and a sense of no-self seem to be necessary—in that order—to realize that state of optimal psychological well-being.” — Jack Engler
Sources: See Sloww Sunday #201
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
👣 Featured Product: Wise Walk: 365 Days of Enlightening Exercise
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
