You Only Like the Beginning of Things
updated 8mo ago
You Only Like the Beginning of Things
The furusato fantasy offers one view on the fusion of commerce and the countryside, but it doesn’t really land in the West, especially in America. Here, capitalism and pastoralism are often seen as opposing forces. So, too, personal benefit and collective good.
from The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing by theatlantic.com
Jonathan Simcoe added
- And yet what they offer is not simply a fantasy of wealth itself. It is the fantasy of a well-lived life — the sense of having reached a place of power and inhabiting it comfortably. In a landscape where women their age are portrayed as either powerless and pitiful or powerful and despised, this feels revelatory.
from The Rise of the Over-50 Fashion Mentors (Published 2022) by New York Times
Keely Adler added
“There is a strange feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that… [but] there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about." - Marie-Louise von Franz
Andreas Vlach added
- The tendency to craft fictional realms is a natural human instinct, argues media scholar Mark Wolf in Building Imaginary Worlds (2012), a comprehensive study on constructed worlds. Our fascination begins in childhood. Youthful proclivities for fairy tales (“Once upon a time, in a land far, far away”) and the imaginary “[do] not change over time,” W... See more
from Dirt: Worldbuilding, Pt. 1 by Dirt
Keely Adler added
- It doesn’t have to be the way it is is a playful statement, made in the context of fiction, with no claim to “being real.” Yet it is a subversive statement.
Subversion doesn’t suit people who, feeling their adjustment to life has been successful, want things to go on just as they are, or people who need support from authority assuring them that thin... See morefrom Ursula K. Le Guin — 28. It Doesn’t Have To Be the Way It Is
Tara McMullin added
- “The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself,” Bergson wrote, “and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.” Once again, the seemingly dispiriting message here is actually a liberating one. Since every real-world choice about how to liv... See more
from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Alex Wittenberg and added
- the way I navigate the world right now is I’ve developed a fair amount of defensive suspicion about certain kinds of pleasure. A marker of design game-like systems is that they’re very pleasurable to operate in.
from A Philosophy of Games That Is Really a Philosophy of Life by New York Times
Leo Guinan added
The place we unconsciously strive toward is what ancient philosophers of habit called our telos—our goal, our end. But the telos we live toward is not something that we primarily know or believe or think about; rather, our telos is what we want, what we long for, what we crave. It is less an ideal that we have ideas about and more a vision of “the
... See morefrom You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K. A. Smith
Jonathan Simcoe added