Youth is like Spring, an overpraised season—delightful if it happen to be a favored one, but in practice very rarely favored and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes. For society to exists, whether it is a colony of birds, a pack of dogs, a school of fish, or a human society, it must have structure—patterned and recurrent relationships among group members. Leaders encourage participation from all members of the human population. Keeping meetings lively and fast-pace can prevent the non-participation that results from boredom. The leader is responsible for establishing a supportive climate. This may mean confronting members who are disrupting meetings or creating competitiveness. Humor helps relieve tension and improve the group climate. A leader expresses feelings when appropriate and promotes a supportive environment in which others can express their feelings. This is a true hero’s journey of healing and awakening, understanding the relationships between different ideas or experiences of past and present emotionally as well as intellectually, encountering all that we have been and are.  #RyanPhillippe 1 of 5

Much of social life is repetitive and enduring. Along the way, we cultivate an intimacy with everything that we are—high and low, dark and light, masculine and feminine, mortal and immortal—for the benefit of one and all. This is a primal odyssey pulsing in every being’s blood, whether one embarks on it or not. A corporation, for example, is stable because it is strategically structured. It has a president, vice-president, department heads, and specialists in many areas, and all have fairly clear ideas about their rights, expectations, responsibilities, and duties relative to others members of the business community. People are hired and fired, some retire others transition to another state of reality, yet the corporation endures. To some, this suggests that social structures, whether families, schools, corporations, or fraternities, are rigid and changeless structures. This provides navigational guidance for us to step more fully into our own authenticity, and help deepen our capacity for taking wise care of ourselves and our environment. Social institutions are basic to the proper functioning of contemporary societies. Therefore, institutions provide the framework for social interaction in our everyday lives. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 5

I have seen many people suffer by shutting themselves off from their own depths, stranding themselves from what would enable them to have truly fulfilling lives and relationships—not just their empathy, vulnerability, and capacity for emotional literacy, but also their true powers and resolve, their authenticity, their capacity to anchor themselves in real integrity. There is a deeper life for people, a life in which responsibility and freedom go together, with one the other and level upon level, a life in which happiness is not at the bloody root of what material possession we have, but in what we fundamentally are. Of all social institutions, the family is perhaps the most important. It regulates sexual activity and it produces new members and social interaction in our everyday lives. In some societies families also transmit cultural knowledge, but in modern societies the educational institution fulfills the basic needs of training each new generation. The economic institution produces and distributes goods and services, the political institution provides order and defense, and the religious institution fulfills the social need for meaning, social solidarity, and control. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 5

When I was younger, my father found me a government job as an office assistant. My three coworkers were older than, and much more Worldly. They claimed they drank huge quantities of beer—frequently bragging about their prodigious barfing—and apparently had had countless girlfriends. Neither was true for me (I had not had a girlfriend yet nor been drunk even once), and I was unable to pretend otherwise. I felt horrible, not knowing how to include myself in their exploit-recounting conversations. I was too fearful of their judgement to remove myself from these talks—or even remove myself from these talks—or to even consider challenging what they were saying. Their bragging and snickered asides about how they would like to “get into her pants” or how they would not “throw her out of bed for eating cake” left me numb. The ubiquitous “her” was out of my reach. The discovery of a secret implied no obligation to retain it. Evil fame and scandal are always new. When the offender has forgot a vile fact, it is often told to one and to another who, having never heard of it before, trumpet it about as a novelty.  I could not participate in my coworkers’ World any more than I could in that of my high school friends when they would talk for hours about fuel injectors, 24-inch chrome rims, and huge engines. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 5

The favors or help that people give one another is measured as reciprocal services, also known as benevolence. Asking someone foe a favor can make that person readier to like the person who asks. If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner. This effect arises from this component of tie strength. When one person does something for another, both parties feel closer. By addressing problems before they can grow larger, conscientious individuals maintain better health overall and, on average, live longer with better quality of life. Conscientious individuals perform better at some jobs than others. The relationship between conscientiousness and job performance generally curves: Although reliable, conscientious people who meet deadlines and attend to details tend to do better work than those who are less reliable; the excessively meticulous person may, however, be less efficient. Spending all morning trying to get paper in the printer to line up right is unproductive for someone who needs to type and print a report by noon.  #RyanPhillippe 5 of 5