When filtered by one’s life experience, the outcome will always be less than perfect, yet never entirely wrong.

There’s only the times we live in. We can bitch about them or we can move forward, and if you don’t move forward . . . well, you’ll be left behind, left in the past, which makes no sense, because the present is all we have.

“You know, I think that in the future we’re going to look back on the forty-hour workweek with 3 percent unemployment as a social failure—everyone was busy but no one was actually doing anything meaningful. Yes, you were busy all day, but so what?”

“Hi! I’m Greece! I’m the happy, sunny Shirley Valentine country, where the living is easy and your days are filled with nothing if not the absence of labor. There’s ouzo. There’s outdoor chess. And for tourists there’s an ever-present whiff of the possibility of sex with people out of your league.”

Worrying about money is one of the worst worries. It’s like having locked-in syndrome, except you’re still moving around and doing things. Your head burns.

Ideology is for people who don’t trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.”

I’ve written before that worrying about money is a bit like having locked-in syndrome—except you’re still able to move around and be a part of the world.

Collecting and hoarding seem to be about the loss of others, while philanthropy and de-accessioning are more about the impending loss of self. (Whoever dies with the most toys actually loses.)

In the 1990s there was that expression, “Get a life!” You used to say it to people who were overly fixating on some sort of minutia or detail or thought thread, and by saying, “Get a life,” you were trying to snap them out of their obsession and get them to join the rest of us who are still out in the world, taking walks and contemplating trees and