Oscar Wilde once said “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”.

We are going to have to get a lot weirder and do more human stuff, as Kevin Roose wrote. There is so much to do, so much to see, and perhaps language might not be enough to describe the world that we are in. Like even writing this piece I feel gaps in what I want to say and what you might be thinking.

Goethe said once “if we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming”.

There is something called “being chronically online” where people almost see themselves as the main character in some big game - life isn’t about other people, it’s about watching people - and they attempt to exempt themselves from criticism, live through others parasocially, and throw stones in the online arena.

"If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes” as Nathalie Robin said.

We are merely a moment in the Milky Way Galaxy, but we forget that. As Aldos Huxley writes in The Doors of Perception -

“To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to

... See more

There’s actually a thesis on the relationship between language, men and knitting by Angela Desmarais1 . Men used to be super into knitting in the 1200’s - in fact, there used to be knitting guilds that you had to train 6 years to get into (of course there were).

The laziest way to create meaning in your life is to find an enemy.

A lot of what we do ties back to language. Communication can be physical, verbal, visual, written, etc and we engage in it constantly. Language is the foundation of how we interact with each other, especially in an online world.

And a very long time ago, in our caveman era, we developed these linguistic abilities for the first time. This came at... See more