Altruism is innate, but it’s not instinctual. Everybody’s wired for it, but a switch has to be flipped.
In my brief glimpse of what is to come I realize how little I care to witness it. I have seen the future and I’m fairly relieved to say, it looks nothing like me.
One of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind.
I am going to the bad place, as is my wont.
I do not go outdoors. Not more than I have to. As far as I’m concerned, the whole point of living in New York City is indoors. You want greenery? Order the spinach.
I find life itself provides ample and sufficient tests of my valor and mettle: illness; betrayal; fruitless searches for love; working for the abusive, the insane, and the despotic. All challenges easily as thrilling to me as scrambling over icy rock in a pair of barely adequate boots.
Simplicity, it seems, has always been wasted on those who simply cannot appreciate it.
There is supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it’s really true: I should have stayed home.
Almost any age is better than twenty-two.
I had a tumor. But it was great.
You can’t win all the contests and then lose at one contest and say, ‘Why am I not winning this contest as well?’ It’s random. So truthfully, again, do I wish it weren’t me? Absolutely. I still can’t make that logistic jump to thinking there’s a reason why it shouldn’t be me.
I have so little control over the act of writing that it’s all I can do to remain conscious.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with being more pessimistic than optimistic. Optimism is broad-based, non-detail-oriented thinking; pessimism is detail-oriented thinking.
This brings up yet another, far more important misconception: that being comically generative and having a sense of humor are one and the same thing. The former is among the least important things in the world, while the latter is among the most. One is a handy social tool, the other an integral component of human survival. It bears repeating a third time: Not being funny doesn’t make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.
There will be peaks of great joy from which to crow and vales of tears out of which to climb. When and why they will happen, no one can say, but they will happen. To all of us. We will all go back and forth from one to the other countless times during a lifetime. This is not some call to bipartisanship between inimical sides. The Happy and the Sad are the same population.
The collective delusion here is overwhelming narcissism posing as altruism.
I think what it means is that central to living A life that is good is a life that’s forgiving.
But thanks to my rapidly dividing cells, I no longer have that feeling – although I remember it very well – that if I just buckled down to the great work at hand, lived more authentically, stopped procrastinating, cut out sugar, then my best self was just there right around the corner. Yeah, no. I’m done with all that. I.
Why not be a communist, she thinks, if it means that kind of belonging?
In the right situation, highly formalized, high-suction ass-kissing not only comes all too naturally to me, it makes me breathless with a feeling of penitential power.
Maybe there is some solace to be derived in that: bacchanal or funeral, after enough time, the detritus looks the same.