The question

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?

Originally asked

Vox, to writers and thinkers, 9 Questions, 2017

Vox used this exact prompt throughout its named 9 Questions series on intellectual habits.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Others on this question

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Henry Marsh Neurosurgeon and writer
For the last few weeks, I've been completely happy. I've got my next PSA in three weeks' time. It may well show my PSA is starting to go up, and the cancer's coming back. Totally to my surprise, I've acquired this sort of Buddhist Zen outlook. Well, the future doesn't exist. I'm well. I'm happy at the moment. I've had a wonderful, exciting life. I've made lots of mistakes. I've trampled on people - yak, yak, yak, as I discuss in my books. But at the moment, today, the sun is shining. I'm very well. It's not that I'm in denial, but I think, well, all right. It may be bad news in three weeks' time, but that's three weeks away. At the moment, I'm well.
Recorded Scott Simon, Weekend Edition Saturday, NPR, 21 January 2023 source ↗
Leon Panetta Attorney and politician; Director of the Office of Management and Budget, White House Chief of Staff, Director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense
I’ve always found Hail Marys to be a great refuge when you’re facing tough decisions and crises of one kind or another.
Recorded Leadership in War and Peace, Academy of Achievement, 14 September 2017 source ↗
Tony Judt Historian and essayist
During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs—since enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable. It is not as though you lose the desire to stretch, to bend, to stand or lie or run or even exercise. But when the urge comes over you there is nothing—nothing—that you can do except seek some tiny substitute or else find a way to suppress the thought and the accompanying muscle memory.
Recorded The New York Review of Books, 14 January 2010 issue, 14 January 2010 source ↗
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Developmental biologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1995
I sing yes sure and I garden, I have a large garden and I really recreate myself by doing gardening and thinking about something else so that when your mind gets free from all the burden of the daily troubles and then you can start putting something fresh in, you know.
Recorded Marika Griehsel, Interview at the 53rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 30 June–4 July 2003, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 July 2003 source ↗

More from Arnold Palmer

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Question What are you most proud of? Identity & self
That’s difficult for someone to talk about themselves. If I’ve helped improve the game of golf and if I’ve helped improve people’s outlook on life and the game of golf, that would be something that I would be very happy for. I would really like to think that maybe I have left something that other people will look at and say, when people come in back of them, that they have given them the same opportunity that we had. And that means give our kids the opportunities that we’ve had through these years. And if I can do that and leave something along those lines to people, I’ll be very happy for that.
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview, Orlando, Florida, 2 December 1997 source ↗

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