anti-perfectionism

While doing the reporting for my book, I read a postmortem from a successful startup founder. They said something along the lines of: “One of the best things that can happen to you is to achieve professional success when you’re young. That way you can learn that it does little to change your happiness.” For better or worse, achieving your goals

Life is fierce and difficult. There is no life we can live without being subject to grief, loss and heartbreak. Half of every conversation is mediated through disappearance. Thus, there is every reason to want to retreat from life, to carry torches that illuminate only our own view, to make enemies of life and of others, to hate what we cannot

Limits cannot hold when it comes to pleasure. What is too much one day is not enough on another. What is too much for one person is just enough for another. And so on. This trouble with pleasure can be lived with. What seemingly can’t is the feeling that the basic laws that shore up our society are only just functioning; every day we face new

I've wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don't want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgment. We don't want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn't remarkable, then we don't have to do any of

Now the internet has given us access to all of it, all at once, and none of it in its real, embodied, sensually lived and shared forms