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
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
Greil Marcus: "Why I Write"
yalereview.org
“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.”
chinese room
Mary’s Room (Frank Jackson): This thought experiment questions the nature of consciousness and the acquisition of knowledge. Mary is a scientist who has lived her entire life in a black and white room, learning about the world through a black and white television. She knows everything there is to know about the physical world and color, but she has... See more
The Veil of Ignorance: Proposed by philosopher John Rawls, this thought experiment asks you to design a just society without knowing your place in it. The "veil" obscures details about yourself such as your age, sex, intelligence, wealth, or race. The idea is to promote fairness and equality, as decisions would be made without considering one's own
... See moreIn a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view
... See moreBertrand Russell • In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you... See more