everything is a conversation

Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you... See more

i cannot overstate how big the difference is between

a - learning a map, then venturing into the territory, and

b - venturing through the territory, then finding out there are maps

Universities claim to promote social mobility but inadvertently perpetuate social hierarchies, whereas the military is an explicit hierarchy that inadvertently promotes social mobility.

my impression of the individuation process is that we all know, at some level, what we need to do... we sense the truths we need to face & the actions we need to take

but it’s a lot of work & suffering and so we spend years trying to negotiate our way out of it. “must I really do this? must I?”

“surely there’s a hack and a shortcut... surely there’s... See more

Old paradigms die hard. Puking, sweating, convulsing every vestige of What No Longer Works into a heaping pile of shitty compost that will eventually grow something new and beautiful, but not until you’re scraped raw of every notion of what that might be.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

― James Baldwin