The Bodega at the End of the Internet

If you find yourself dreading Mondays, quit.

In a moment of despair, Phil turns to a couple drunks at a bowling alley bar and asks them, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”

It’s the question Phil has to answer to advance the plot of the movie, but it’s also the question we have to answer to advance the plot

we mistakenly spend time figuring out how to win the game we're in instead of choosing which game to play in the first place.

The pleasures connected with his work were pleasures of ambition; his social pleasures were those of vanity; but Ivan Ilych’s greatest pleasure was playing bridge.

“Well, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We’re teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it. Create your own. Most people can’t do it. They’re more unhappy than me—even in my current condition.

Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

—Albert Camus

Dandelions don’t know whether they are a weed or a brilliance. But each seed can create a field of dandelions. We are invited to be that prolific. And to return fertility to the soil around us.

This can’t be the purpose of our species, to constantly identify each other as “other,” build walls between us, and engage in both formal and informal wars against each other’s bodies.