The first hard choice

You must spend your life walking through fields of lotuses, listening to the beautiful music of the sirens.

Always, you could come closer to the sirens, and risk destroying yourself.

Always, you could eat more of the lotus, and you could choose to abandon what matters.

This is the first hard choice. You must choose to be the kind

Recognising the role of moral luck encourages empathy and humility, but it also threatens the notions of culpability that help us to make sense of evil.

“It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.”

The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will be bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this

According to the binding problem in neuroscience, if you synchronize different parts of the brain, you get a single consciousness bound together. So following the idea’s logic: if you synchronized different people, what do you get? Is it not at least imaginable you could get some sort of experience that goes beyond any individual person’s conscious

When I talk about enjoying the void, I’m aware that this might sound like a kind of suicidal, or life-denying impulse. It’s the opposite, though. It’s not that I don’t want more life, or that I act without concern for my physical safety. I really like life and the body I happen to live in. It’s just that I experience it as gratuitous, something pre

All this is only preliminary. I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.