Samarth Bansal
@samarthbansal
Samarth Bansal
when you get rid of life’s annoyances, you also have gotten rid of life. Small nuisances provide texture, repose, form, cushioning. Also, a lot of our social bonding is created out of shared annoyance—much of what connects us is our small, similarly timed miseries. The more you opt out of our collective material imprisonment, the more you opt out... See more
Sasha Chapin • This Post Not Sponsored By Unbound Merino
On dealing with the thorny question of separating art from the artist and what it takes to be an artist
Desire and Consumerism
1. advertising induced wants. marketers realized they were not able to reach children, so advertising introduced nagging behavior to get their parents buy them stuff. but material things are not core to human nature.
2. people crave dignity and self-worth of doing something significant. Jonathan Rose has studied the reading habits of the British working class in the late 19th century. they were better educated than than the aristocrats. many efforts made to drive this out of people.
3. the natural thing for humans is to want to be independent and creative. mean maybe you work on a you know the fixing up old cars in your garage in the weekend instead of sitting in the watching television. you want to do something that's significant, that's worthwhile — maybe even if it's a ugly horrible job like going to coal mines instead of taking a government handout because people want dignity and a sense of self-worth and a sense of creating and doing something important. that's what we are.
4. huge part of the economy is devoted to trying to drive these things out of people's heads to make you think that all you want is more commodities so you should go shopping instead of reading/
5. wage labor is not very different from slavery.
6. market economy is supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. but that'd if there was an ad it would be an announcement by
say Ford Motor Company here are the characteristics of the cars I think that's nice,here's what consumer review says about them—that would create informed consumers making rational choices. but it's not what you see. there are huge efforts to try to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices to undermine market economies and turn people into people who believe that what they want is to sit on a couch and watch television.
The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more
Maria Popova • Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age
The Reversal Test: When considering a proposed policy, imagine if the roles were reversed. For example, if a policy proposes special treatment for a particular group, consider if you would support it if your own group were not the beneficiary. This experiment, proposed by philosopher Nick Beckstead, can help reveal biases and inconsistencies in our... See more
“I realized I had a choice as a writer: make the world bigger and more interesting and live in that world, and find a life’s work, or shrink everything down to your own crabbed and paltry self, hang on for years conning editors and publishers and yourself, and find your life’s a lie.”
David Lynch on the limitations of language:
“Cinema is a language. It can say things—big, abstract things. And I love that about it. I’m not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things,... See more