It’s not auto parts that need to be fulfilled. It’s fucking art. Treat it as such. Give it a little reverence. Music used to be the thing. That is what I was doing. If I had time, I was listening to music. I wasn’t doing it in the background while I was doing five other things. And I wasn’t treating it as a disposable commodity. I don’t go into the cinema and do my taxes while the movie is playing. I’m there to watch a movie. I kinda miss the attention music got.
I’m guessing you’ve been quite courageous. But before I get into guessing, let me start with what I 100% know. I know that I’ve always enjoyed being around you and your brightness, thoughtfulness, and ease. As xxxxxxxxx became unreachable years ago, it was not just the loss of his company, but also of yours. I will always and forever cherish great times I had with you.
Now back to courage. Too often, discussions about courage revolve around the dramatic: running into burning buildings, pushing of children out of traffic. These acts are to be celebrated, for sure, but they are unthinking momentary impulses that come from who knows where. Furthermore, the opportunity to exhibit courage in this manner may never arrive. So I like emphasizing a second, more ordinary form: doing hard things for oneself that conflict with the interests of people one cares about and may well conflict with some of one’s interests and values as well.
Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.
I only really want to do things for their own sake. That is one definition of art. Whether it’s business, exercise, romance, friendship, whatever. I think the meaning of life its to do things for their own sake. Ironically, when you things for their own sake, you create your best work. Even if you’re just trying to make money, you will actually be the most successful.
Tools and leverage create this disconnection between inputs and outputs. The higher the creativity component of a profession, the more likely it is to have disconnected inputs and outputs. If you’re looking at professions where your inputs and your outputs are highly connected, it’s going to be very hard to create wealth and make wealth for yourself in that process.
Status is a zero-sum game. It’s a very old game … And for number three to move to number two, number two has to move out of that slot.
An old boss once warned: “You’ll never be rich since you’re obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job that’s just good enough.”
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
Movies
Books
New Music
Old Music
There will be ways-of-life that are only possible during specific life phases. One should be careful rushing past these ways, especially when what awaits is a way that’s possible in many life phases.
So, refrain from living in an apartment far from campus when a dorm is the default option. You’ll always be able to live in apartments far from life; you’ll never again be able to live in a dorm.
Em-dash: use this for sentence interjections and sentence enders; can be used to replace colon. Wide as capital ‘M.’ Get there in Word with –. Can use or not use a space before and after. I like using the space. Or ctrl + alt + minus sign.
En-dash: half width of Em. Used to show range. Ctrl + minus in word. Often equivalent to to or versus. Width of “N.” Often represented with hyphen.
Hyphen: if two or more consecutive words make sense only when understood together as an adjective modifying a noun that follows, those words (excluding the noun) should be hyphenated. So special-interest money, but not special interest. Credit card vs. credit-card application.
How many people here witnessed xxxxxxxxx in a state where she was clearly struggling?
And how many here were then angry, sad, scared, confused, annoyed, frustrated?
I certainly was all of those things at some point during the past four years when she was my roommate. Over time I came to view her situation as akin to cancer: she wasn’t actively choosing in any meaningful sense to struggle. She had a disease and it was with her on both good days and bad.
While this realization didn’t erase the negative feelings, it did imbue the positive ones with more meaning because while it’s certainly nice when a man with a closet of shirts gives you the shirt off his back, it means something else entirely when he has no other shirt.
And xxxxxxxxx indeed provided me with much to be grateful for.
At the most basic level, yes, obviously, you need to care for yourself. But that’s not what “self-care” has come to mean. Similar to “good vibes only,” “self-care” is a selfish narrowing of the world, where your needs, wants, and desires are all the matter. If someone else happens to overlap with your vibes, cool, but if not, fuck that: my good vibes only.
And since when did it become hard to address your needs? Isn’t that the default position? Don’t you just unthinkingly do what your self, in this very moment, wants? And isn’t THAT the problem? That you are so focused on yourself, you’ve missed that perhaps the best way to care for yourself is to care for others? Instead of self-care, how about WWJD? How about civic duty, responsibility, honor? How about some real fucking values?
So I’ll start taking “self-care” seriously when someone says she is caring for herself by helping grandmas cross the street or by doing something she doesn’t want to do, like reading a book instead of binging another mindless show.
There is no comfort quite like the comfort offered by forward-focused excuses. “Forward-focused” means we aren’t explaining away past behavior – If only I had a good night of sleep I would have crushed that test– but rather dreaming and hoping that If I get this thing in the future, then my current issue will be resolved. The current issue is almost always some form of unhappiness. Hence the comfort: one is able to soothe himself with an explanation (read: excuse) for why the present unhappiness won’t persist forever. After all, suffering is easier to endure when it plausibly promises to be less than infinite.
But there’s also comfort via the meaning derived from chasing. What will you do with your time when eating, sleeping, and work are completed? Even the most motivated needs more than margaritas and some great show on Netflix. To have a forward-focused excuse provides a satisfactory answer that creates good feelings through both the pleasant thoughts of the-stuff-that-you-could-do and the tangible actions undertaken. Armed with an answer, you now have an additional reason to wake up, at least on some days.