nick

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

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.

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

I am susceptible to frivolity. I know this about myself. I love beauty; I am weak to surfaces; I am apt to mistake eccentricity for character. I drink more than I should. I love overdressing; I love staying up past midnight; I love breakfasts at all-night diners, and the Irish coffees you order when you can’t decide whether it’s night or morning.