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.)

But what is ultimately most bizarre about The Biggest Loser is the total absence of any dialogue on the politics of obesity. There’s no dialogue on government-mandated corn-growing. There’s no dialogue on GMO corn or lysine molecules. There’s no dialogue on food stamps, no dialogue on advertising and no dialogue on sugar, pesticides, colony collaps

We all get our information from the same place, and there’s just one menu and it’s called “The Same Internet for Everyone on Earth.”

A defining sentiment of our new era is that never before has being an individual been so easily broadcast, yet never before has individuality felt so ever-increasingly far away.

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

In the future, current class structures will dissolve and humanity will settle into two groups: those people who have actual skills (surgeons, hairdressers, helicopter pilots) and everyone else, who are kind of faking it through life. Implicit in aclassification is the idea that a fully linked world no longer needs a middle class.

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

I figure I’ve probably lost almost four years of my life to depression—four years utterly flushed down the toilet, with the only benefit being, as with my suicide evening, increased empathy for the human condition.

“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.”