Obsession is a talent itself. Not everyone can be intense. If you are intense, then I have just one advice for you: redirect that energy away from people and focus it on a skill, an interest, a business. People are not projects you can own.

Cashier at the gas station asked if we wanted a separate bag for the wine because she was worried it would break and he just goes, "Nah, it's fine. My wife will just drink it off the floor."

Most people who complain about decline in the quality of art are people who have lost their capacity to feel moved by art. Their problem is not that art has gotten worse, but that they have gotten worse.

Notice how nobody has personality traits anymore. The way Discourse has it, no one is kind, or scatterbrained, or inconsiderate, or inconsistent, or brave. Instead people have diagnoses: autism, BPD, depression, ADHD.

Those who are right do not argue. Those who argue are not right.

The saving of society is 'built-in': society's problems are fractally reflected in everyone, including the hero, aka, he at the long tail. By solving their shit the hero, fractally, solves Society's shit. This is why, when they succeed, the solutions they found generalize.

Ji Kang asked Confucius about government, saying, "What do you say to killing the unprincipled for good of the principled?" Confucius replied, "Sir, in carrying on your government, why should you use killing at all? Let your evinced desires be for what is good, and the people will be good. The relation between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend, when the wind blows across it."

I have never enjoyed the moment where you search a band on Spotify and get shown a photo of them. Genuinely a uniquely negative experience every single time.

Sometimes addicts say things that are oddly motivating. They're some of the only people with total single minded focus. Listened to an interview, guy says, "You tell yourself: I'll just do this in my free time. But then you realize: you have a lot more free time than you thought."

You might start out a novel with the intention to eviscerate some person you don't like through your portrayal of them, but it's impossible to depict anyone accurately if the only thing you feel for them is contempt.

Imagine: a man. He is in a room somewhere. He has many items around him --- normal objects. At this time, each item is tethered to a physical experience, how he obtained it, where he went, who he was with, and so on. His entire life is like this --- a physical metal network, enmeshed. He has a stack of games and movies. When he looks at each one, he remembers buying it, or getting it from a friend. He remembers putting it in his car, losing it, finding it --- all this colors his perception of it and his experience with it. How could it not? He picks one up.

He is alone. Really alone. It's late. At this hour, it would be bizarre for someone to call his house phone. He's just playing a game, alone. It's not a popular game, so he's not really sure what other people think about it. How would he know? He's just playing a game, alone. He could probably find out what other people thought about it, with some effort, but why would he care? It's just something he experiences in his world, tethered to a network of physical memories, that he can share if he wants --- or not. It's a small private semi-physical experience.

Zygmunt Bauman (modern sociologist) wrote a book called "Liquid Modernity", coining the term. It doesn't exactly refer to this, but it's such a potent term. 'Liquid Modernity'. You can't really push around liquid. You can't really hold it, fold it, you can --- a little, just enough. You can kind of make liquid do what you want, but it's always going to return to its default state. To work with it is to fight its intrinsic nature. It just wants to flow, lose its shape, return to the formless sea. It seems like its primary quality is that it's just not solid.

Does the man described above have more or less in common with a stone age man, compared to us? To look at a basket, a saddle, a piece of paper, a song, and have it be mapped to a physical sensory timeline, or to ask: how did people buy, see things, go places, before: the liquid?

Even something as simple as "facing reality vs. believing in pretty lies" requires the will to sustain mental pain, a will that those who are not virtuous don't have, this is why you can see that the prevalence of pretty lies and enabling goes up as the curve of virtue goes down.

"A quick note" "mind you" "by the way" "side note" anytime you hear this from a woman that's when you start listening.

A soul that is capable of great evil is first capable. It can eventually use that capability for great good.

The very notion of claiming an artwork as belonging to you, the conscious self-illusion, is in itself an act of theft. All art belongs to the gods of noospheric unconscious, it is merely the conjuration approach that differs.

What doesn't kill you will text you once in a while just to make sure you're still attached.