hmm

I walked home that night with a sense that I needed to slow my life down so that I don’t get to the end of it and wonder where everyone went when I wasn’t looking.

I didn’t want to lose anything. That was the main problem,” Sarah Manguso writes on the opening page of Ongoingness, her short book about learning to let herself forget things. She long fears being “lost in time,” until finally she realizes (as I’ve quoted once before), “the forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life.” In re... See more

These are the run clubs and swim clubs with very robustly branded websites for some reason, websites that greet you with full-width videos of delighted people being very sweaty together. New ventures for “group conversation” or exclusive social spaces or curated clubs with sign-up flows and membership levels that evoke the rigor of a bank account r... See more

my belief that everyone’s most difficult trait is tied to their most winning one, e.g. a flighty person might also be fun and whimsical, or a neurotic person might be thoughtful and curious, therefore in order to love them wholly you must appreciate all manifestations of their core being. Dualism, basically, and I’m not the first to say it, but I t... See more

Is authenticity the goal or itself a performance?

He described modernity’s obsession with Machen —do/make—as the belief that only what we can build, manipulate, or produce is real. This becomes the default metaphysics of acceleration: faster iteration, more output, more control. But Ratzinger contrasts this with another mode of being: Verstehen and Stehen —to understand and to stand. That is, to s... See more

American society’s extreme individualism, electronic financial system, and thoroughly impersonal consumer retail setup mean that most adults can obtain 99% of their essential needs without real social networking of any kind. The system we live in is established mostly on impersonal trust. Every ordinary product or service in America is available wi... See more