The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

Coffee and antidepressants are good drugs, or moral drugs, because they don’t prevent us from doing our jobs. But opiates and alcohol are morally questionable—they change reality too much.

There’s no compassion fatigue without compassion: The caretakers at risk see somebody suffering, and they want to reduce the suffering. But they can’t always succeed. Compassion fatigue, then, is stymied compassion.

You can’t prepare for the worst-case scenario when the scenario keeps getting rapidly worse.

A progress trap is a development that looks at first like a clear advancement but in time proves to actually deoptimize the system.

In this age of horrible news all the time, we understand it instantly: ironic suicidal ideation. But there’s something real behind it—the fantasy of the swift death, the instinct to just get it over with.

In this light, compassion is a matter of aesthetics.

There are things I can’t stomach anymore—I never listen to NPR in the car now. I’ve replaced it with top-forty stations; vacuity seems preferable to pandering.

Social media, with its reach and immediacy, even intimacy, threatens the “us versus them” classifications we make so naturally. It exposes us to people who are suffering thousands of miles away.

have noticed that people who take and post selfies on the internet tend to choose photos from the same angle and showing the same expression. I think we must choose the photos that look most like our self-image; that self-image is then reinforced by the photos.