sometimes it feels like ~90% of communication problems are rooted in failure to acknowledge that our inner lives can, and in fact are, very very different so many crusades, so little acceptance
Just found a book website that gives you the first page of a random book without the title or author so that you can read it with no preconceptions!!! Great for discovering new recs omg
J.R.R. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, Letter 267: When I think of my mother’s death (younger than Prisca) work out with persecution, poverty, and, largely consequent, disease, in the effort to hand on to us small boys the Faith, and remember the tiny bedroom she shared with us in rented rooms in a postman’s cottage at Rednal, where she died alone, too ill for viaticum, I find it very hard and bitter, when my children stray away [from the Church]. Of course Canaan seems different to those who have come into it out of the desert.
The one thing you should never, ever, ever do is bring your full self. Leave your full self at home where it belongs and act like a professional and a grownup at work and in public.
The only book about this topic I know that takes the male perspective seriously: talking about something makes it object and marriage is something your should be subject (ie subordinated) to. I.e. marriage improves via connection NOT communication, which hinders it. - how to improve your marriage without talking about it
so much of adulthood is just grieving in secret. grieving ex lovers, grieving dead friendships, grieving your parents sinking into old age, grieving the person you thought you’d grow into. grieving cities you never got to live in. grieving parts of you that couldn’t survive.
The biggest trap in all “matrix” discourse is that it usually involves people thinking that “escaping” is a singular event rather than a perpetual movement that requires constant effort
One stunning lesson from the last 100 years is that a technology is not “unlocked” for civilization by researching it, instead a technology mostly turns out to be the living knowledge in the thousands of heads who work on that technology. If they die, the technology mostly dies.
“Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. Taht’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.” - Erica Jong
I never liked the western part of the US. It’s very beautiful however, it always felt to me like man never conquered it. I felt entombed by nature. Like I was fighting a battle I couldn’t win. Never liked the vibes.
i suspect that there’s a way to do ’tagging’/‘categories’ in a way that isn’t currently being done well by any particular app/platform/service, and that if someone does it well, it’ll end up being copied by many others, like snapchat stories and roam’s [[bidirectional links]]
it used to annoy me when older folks told the same story over and over, but then i realized that’s how oral culture works: you keep listening to the story so that after they’re gone, you can tell it to the next generation yourself