101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think

“To be effective is to be a machine, a product of the age. A well-oiled, consumerist-serving, digitally attuned, highly unaware but overtly operational robot. And so we suffer.”

Here, Wiest uses metaphor to compare a person to a machine in an attempt to explain why people suffer. The reason is that they act like machines—they are not in touch with their emotions and only aim to be productive. She argues that to be too effective in a capitalist society is to lose one’s humanity.

“Have you ever felt joy for more than a few minutes? What about anger? No? How about tension, depression, and sadness? Those have lasted longer, haven’t they? Weeks and months and years at a time, right?”

Wiest asks these questions directly to the reader and then responds as if it is a conversation. They are rhetorical questions, but at the same time, she provides her own answers, still in the form of questions. The use of questions forces the reader to draw their own conclusions and softens the pain of new realizations.

“Numbness is not nothing, neutral is nothing. Numbness is everything all at once.”

Wiest uses alliteration and repetition to express the idea that numbness is not the goal. The alliteration makes the statement more resonant, and the repetition emphasizes the point. Both create the sense of spoken language, which adds to the conversational tone.

“Feel your heartbeat; imagine it outside of you. You would not look at your heart and think: ‘That is me.’ You’d think: ‘That is my heart.’”

This exercise in imagery aims to encourage the reader to consider the core of who they are. Wiest asks the reader to visualize the process of literally removing their organs so that they can understand the fact that they are different from their parts.

“You cannot beat fear to the finish line. You are not cheating your way around pain. You’re actively pursuing more and more of it.”

Wiest draws a metaphor here to draw attention to the futility of a person thinking they can “beat” fear in a race. She compares the effort to control fear as an attempt to “cheat” the pain, extending the race metaphor.

“The fact that the way to change your life is to change the way you think, and the way to change the way you think is to change what you read.”

This quote, provided in a list of truths, uses repetition to emphasize the fact that all change begins in one’s mind. This repetition also has an epigrammatic quality (a pithy saying that expresses an idea in a clever or witty way).

“Your mind creates; it is not created.”

Wiest here explores the use of passive and active voice. To emphasize the role of the mind in creating its own reality, she uses active voice in the first phrase. In the second, to emphasize the fact that it is the creator, she uses passive voice.

“In the true essence of real Zen, the most creativity can be fostered when you learn to do so without passing judgment, similar to how observing your thoughts and feelings objectively are the path to peace as well.”

In an essay about the power of creativity, Wiest brings it back to finding peace. She compares the act of creating without judgment to the act of observing one’s own thoughts without judgment. This comparison emphasizes the importance of both processes.

“The only problem with your life is the way you think about it. Objectively, you have everything you could ever want or need.”

Wiest writes in the second person to make a near accusation directly to the reader. She uses the word “objectively” to respond to the reader’s potential disagreement with the first statement.

“The pain of not having love is the pain of your heart being closed. The pain of losing love is the pain of your heart closing.”

Wiest uses repetition and imagery to emphasize the difference between these two phenomena and the pain of heartbreak. The image of a closed or closing heart reminds the reader of the importance of having an open heart.

“The answers to these questions are some that have (literally) changed the course of my life.”

Here, Wiest uses parentheses as a way to create a conversational tone. The word “literally” is common in the modern lexicon, and she uses it here to relate to her audience and gain credibility.

“Truly coming to peace with anything is being able to say: ‘Thank you for that experience.’”

Wiest presents this as an example of how she wants the reader to recognize the importance of all experiences, even painful ones. If they can be thankful for what hurt them, then they have grown.

“Animals don’t actualize what it means to have gotten their prey or not. They don’t consider the psychological implications of a potential mate walking away. They don’t piece together their lives or reach for ‘more.’ Their instinctive existence works because they don’t inherently desire to transcend it.”

Wiest references the actions of animals to emphasize the ridiculousness of some of the actions of humans. Animals can attain happiness because they do not constantly seek more.

“Would you spend your time in gyms and stores or in libraries and temples? Who would you let yourself fall in love with? What would your ‘type’ be? Tall, dark, and handsome or creative, kind, and self-aware? Whom would we idolize, and what? How much of our governing body would be fit to lead? Whom would we make famous? Whom would we celebrate?”

This passage demonstrates Wiest’s use of rhetorical questions to encourage the reader to consider deeply. The questions let the reader draw their own conclusions, which will have more resonance and individual relevance than they would if Wiest provided the answers for them.

“What would happen if we could see people not as ‘bad,’ but as…blocked? If we could see the ways they’ve packed away their pain, or how they hold a belief that keeps them away from being kind to others? How they are unaware that those issues even exist?”

Wiest continues to use rhetorical questions to pose ideas that are difficult for people to accomplish. She also uses imagery of a person putting their pain in a box to urge the reader to have sympathy for people who they view as “bad.”

“Love is not your life; it is the avenue through which you share your life (and more palpably, see yourself.”

Wiest’s argument makes clear the role of love in a person’s life by stating that it is just a means to share and learn. She uses alliteration to add clarity.

“Love does not suck. People do not suck. You suck.”

Here, Wiest uses repetition and parallel sentence structure to dispel the idea that a person’s feelings are about anything other than themselves. She speaks directly to the reader in the second-person voice to further the directness of her assertion.

“In Plato’s The Republic, he tells an (oft-cited) allegory of men chained together in a cave, with their backs to a flame, believing that the masterfully crafted shadows that those behind them were holding up were reality.”

Wiest references Plato’s allegory of the cave in order to gain credibility and authority. She explains the necessary elements of the allegory for the reader who does not know it but flatters the audience with an erudite reference from classical philosophy.

“Being in love with somebody that you only used to know is like falling in love with a book (which sounds like a dumb example but people really do fall in love with them). The point is: You can love it all you want, but it’s a story that runs parallel to yours. At the end of the day it’s static. It’s memory. It’s a sentence and you can’t change it. It ends how it ends. It says what it says.”

Wiest uses simile to compare loving someone you no longer know to reading a book. This simile helps emphasize the finality of the love that is no longer there. The physical comparison makes the abstract concept easier for the reader to grasp.

“Acceptance is the root of abundance.”

Wiest uses alliteration, assonance, and metaphor here to emphasize this idea. If acceptance is the root, the vitally strong part of the organism, then abundance is the plant, the results of those roots doing their job.

“You should rise and say, ‘This is who I am, even if you’ll crucify me for it’ in the very way so many religious and political and social idols and icons have, even if their fans and followers are the very ones who will do the crucifying.”

By using the word “crucify,” Wiest alludes to Christian thinking. She does this to emphasize the extent to which a person should not rely on others’ perceptions of them and to evoke tones of judgment and betrayal.

“It’s the human equivalent of metamorphosis, the darkness against which we can finally see the light.”

Here, Wiest compares the experience of pain to the process of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. This lets the reader see the importance and inevitability of pain by giving it a visual image that has a positive connotation.

“If you want to be emotionally free, there is only one thing you need to understand: Whatever problem you think you have right now is not the actual problem.”

Wiest chooses this grammatical structure to summarize one of the major arguments in her book. She argues that the problem is how a person sees a situation, not the situation. She expresses the gravity of this idea by using second person and a colon.