We humans have always defined ourselves by narration. What's happening today is that we're allowing multi-national corporations to tell our stories for us. The theme of corporate stories (and millions drink them in every day) seldom varies: to be happy you must consume, to be special you must conform.
Even the most open-ended games tend to offer a sense of progress and direction, completion and commitment. In other words, they make people happy—or at least happier, serving as a buffer between the player and despair. Video games, you might say, offer a sort of universal basic income for the soul.
…average immigrant attainment is inversely related to the number admitted from a source country and positively related to the population of that source country.
So, as long as you aren’t a Consumer Sucka, commuting to work in a bank-financed gas-powered racing sofa and borrowing money for furniture and appliances to outfit that last spare room in your suburban mansion, recessions are a great thing. Housing and profitable investments become cheaper, insanity and speculation is reset, and people actually start living more frugally again, getting back to the roots of what living a good life really means.
In succinct terms, recessions are caused when a bunch of people lose confidence all at once.
You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.
You know, the matrix says, ‘Pick an identity and stick with it. Because I want to sell you some beer and shampoo and I need you to stick with what you are so I’ll know how to market it to you.’ Drag is the opposite. Drag says, 'Identity is a joke.'
Pop is the most seductive force the world has ever known; it has more – and more devoted – adherents than all religions put together. It is more deeply loved, more trusted, and a more constant companion in our joys and sorrows than any other art form.
Perry names his avatar of white, middle-class, heterosexual males “Default Man,” observing how, “with their colorful textile phalluses hanging around their necks,” Default Men run the world, taking up 77 percent of seats in the U.K. government, and making up 92 percent of executive directors of British companies.
Men are “conditioned to be something that is no longer needed,” primed for conflict and dominance and aggression in societies that are evolving to prize tolerance and emotional intelligence instead.
Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
Here are eight body-language hacks that can be tricky to master but will pay off forever once you do:
Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.
The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Change of Perspective, 1923-28 vol. 3.
pentheraphobia - n. fear of one’s mother-in-law
School is learning things you don't want to know, surrounded by people you wish you didn't know, while working toward a future you don't know will ever come.
Never memorise what you can look up in a book.
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Life is pain, anyone who says differently is selling something.
Susan Sontag lists her 10 rules for raising a child:
- News organizations are a public trust with the ability to inform and influence the public conversation.
- I know. That’s why I bought one.
Newsroom S01E03