If every generation in recorded history had not insisted that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, we might be tempted to single out our own for lamentation.

There is the opportunity within the framework of civilized personage to live a life of our own design.

Life is a never-ending series of choices but those we choose to focus on. The game changers are those choices that determine who we become.

Our study of autonomy and life — the autonomy of our subjective experience of life — is our means to authority, to presence, to our claim of authenticity and legitimacy.

Yet a focused study of the subject of autonomy and life has enabled a new and more powerful perspective or vantage point—a more open mind—with which to deal with the conditions that have circumscribed us to date.

The autonomy of one is trending now. As never before, we are being asked to stand alone. The marketing geniuses are in on it, too.

When we study autonomy and life, we recognize, and we experience, that we are in possession of ourselves when our minds can coax further insight from our carefully purposed focus.

We are driven by habits of mind, compelled by social forces and bewitched by other-worldly conundrums that are often out-of-step with the better of our instincts.

We must be willing to reveal to ourselves, let alone to another, what we’ve chosen to forget and to remove the masks of character we employ.

Many of the instincts and sentiments to which we were born and bred are not a resonant and forward-looking match for us as individuals or for us collectively in the cosmopolitan and connected world we live in today.