other lives

Adult life, I’ve decided, is about cohesion. Which is to say it’s about conflict, trade-offs. The ability to acknowledge parts of your psyche you aren’t proud of. The idea that sometimes in life you have to make a choice, and the choice is not only not a perfect choice, but often not even a particularly moralchoice: that you can argue for it or

What was the goal of experience, aside from some feminist reclamation? It was an attempt to encounter as much of the world as possible, to soak up otherness and change as much as we possibly could; part of the inadequacy of living in this pursuit was the futility of trying to escape ourselves. “We really wish to be multiple,” Greif wrote in 2005.

You are daring to imagine that you could have a different life. Oh, I know it doesn't feel like that. You feel like a big fat failure now. But you're not. You are marching into the unknown armed with...
Nothing. Have a sandwich.

(You’ve Got Mail, 1998)

It’s hard when you are in one place and you want to be in another. It’s hard and it’s the human condition. It’s hard when other people get what you want and you see only glimpses and you feel jealous and angry and like they don’t deserve it or they’ve forgotten you or forgotten what it feels like, how bad it feels, to be where you are. And

Look at all the good around you. Of all the lives you could have lived, how wonderful and special is it that you get to live this one?

James Clear 3-2-1

As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life—but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever.

So, even though you have broken my heart yet again, I wanted to say, in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.

(Everything Everywhere All At Once)