Reclaiming Reality

“Ideas can be killed," she says, stepping into the airlock.

"How?"

"With better ideas.”

― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“I knew I was getting somewhere when I began losing interest in the beginnings and the ends of things.”

-Sarah Manguso

We recoil from the notion that this is it—that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at. Instead, we mentally fight against the way things are—so that, in the words of the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, “we don’t have to