“Life is complicated. It’s filled with nuance. It’s unsatisfying. If I believe in anything, it is doubt. The root cause of all life’s problems is looking for a simple fucking answer.”
—Anthony Bourdain https://t.co/fCvqAqf7Ik
“Life is complicated. It’s filled with nuance. It’s unsatisfying. If I believe in anything, it is doubt. The root cause of all life’s problems is looking for a simple fucking answer.” —Anthony Bourdain https://t.co/fCvqAqf7Ik
The reason why Epistemic anxiety bothers you so much is because it is at odds with a universal human feeling: An innate desire for truth.
Utsav Mamoria • How to Live an Intellectually Rich Life
Life is intrinsically confusing and precarious. What makes life unbearable is our mistaken belief that it can be cured. We have limited capacity for conceiving the complexity of the world, and we can relax into that reality. Being comfortable that we won't fully grasp things and relax into doubt.
It’s not always clean and straightforward. But as my mother would say to me, “The world is complicated, Bar. That’s why it’s interesting.”
Barack Obama • How I Approach the Toughest Decisions
Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when... See more
Freddie deBoer • You Are You. We Live Here. This is Now. - Freddie deBoer You Are You. We Live Here. This is Now.
Curiositas generates its own frenetic anxiety, because now I have to “keep up” and stay in the know, striving to be the person who knows before everybody else (Google “Portlandia OVER”). It’s the exhaustion of being perpetually “in the know.” Which explains why this sort of pursuit of “truth” doesn’t ever feel like the beata vita, the happy life.