I sometimes literally burst into tears when I read certain essays or papers now just because it feels so special to have been able to gain access to this part of myself, a part that craves knowledge for its own sake and finds a sometimes-euphoric pleasure in the act of seeking it

Fisher observes that even the high-achieving, intelligent students tend to “want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger”: as a consumable object that will provide for them precisely what they want, when they want it, on demand. “They fail to grasp — and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension — that the... See more

there’s a part in King Kong Theory where Despentes takes this funky psychoanalytic approach to the Hot Smart Girl thing: if I remember correctly she basically says that women feel like they’re castrating their fathers by being smart and so feel the need to present themselves sexually to the world as a way of symbolically fucking their fathers,... See more

I feel like we all know that social media incentivizes us to craft consumable personas, to prioritize surface-level aesthetic experiences over privately-held and deeply-felt emotional ones, to run on envy and memetic desire and competitive self-optimization, to buy things in order to better sell ourselves. We know, too, these are pressures that... See more