And in Rebecca Solnit’s words, “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency…. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.”

That is pretty unfair of me, because not only am I assuming an awful lot, but Laszlo seems pretty content, certainly more content and happier than I am. Feeling sorry for someone, projecting your idea of success and meaning, while perhaps well intended, is awfully insulting

Great questions don't appear

suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes

them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is

not to search for them — not to wander about thinking, what great

discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd

have made it.

The ‘90s version of not selling out meant refusing to play certain spaces or not letting your song be in a beer commercial. The ‘20s version of selling out means making things in limited quantities to play against mass culture. Though different, the responses come from a similar place. They’re both sensing a culture where, to quote Claire L. Evans ... See more

But overall, both research efforts themselves (*cough* behavioral economics *cough*) and “debunking” efforts can be naive in this clueless way, causing infinite regress of levels of bunking/debunking that goes nowhere. Because reality is messier than you think and people are more malicious than you think.

Today there’s a market for everything, no matter how obscure or weird. Delighting the weirdos and outliers is the business model of the long tail.

The water you swim in, but don’t notice.

People with very high expectations have very low resilience

If you're unsatisfied you have two options. Change your experience or change your relationship to experience. The first is agency, the second is spirituality. Both capacities are important, and it takes a lifetime to get the balance right