Quotes
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As a society, our various addictions often have very little to do with personal failings or indiscipline. They have everything to do with a culture that shames and stigmatizes normal, healthy behaviors that simply look “weird.”
Since we’re often punished for being ourselves and doing what we want, we have to sneak around. That creates guilt and anxiety.
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The self-destructive response is to forbid yourself from doing things you enjoy and then wait for the desire to spill over into binges. It’s a familiar story. Depriving yourself of something only enhances the desire. So most Americans live in a relentless loop of binges, purges, and moral panics.
You don’t have to be an expert in sociology to see how other cultures have consistently outperformed us in terms of health and happiness.
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As we near the end of industrial civilization, there’s no end to the prescriptions for mental health. Here’s one I haven’t heard:
Be weird.
Jessica Wildfire, The Case for Being Extremely Weird -
A day of resting is the visible sign that a person lives from the grace of God and not from works.
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Human beings who have been reduced to machines and have been exhausted need rest so that their thoughts can clear, their feelings purified, and their desires be oriented anew.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment -
We need good liturgies, and we need natural ones: we need a life neither patternless nor over patterned, if the city is to be built. And I think the root of it all is caring. Not that that will turn the trick all by itself, but that we can produce nothing good without it. True liturgies take things for what they really are, and offer them up in loving delight.
Robert Farrar Capon, Bread and Board -
At some thoughts one stands perplexed, above all the sight of human sin, and wonders whether to combat it by force or humble love. Always decide ‘I will combat it by humble love.’ If you resolve on that once and for all, you can conquer the whole world. Loving humility is a terrible force: it is the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov -
Identity turns out to be porous – at least the parts that have to do with what you listen to, what you watch, what you eat, what you read. So go ahead, it’s okay, there’s no need to be cool: abandon the canon, shake loose from fixed coordinates, collapse into the blueberry gifts of whatever turns you on.
Jeff Gordinier, My Tie-Dyed Transformation -
I decided it was more important to enjoy life because the best thing people can do in this life is to eat, drink, and enjoy life. At least that will help people enjoy the hard work God gave them to do during their life on earth.
Ecclesiastes 8:15 -
Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labour on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare.
Isaiah 55:2 -
I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:17-19 -
Algorithmic supremacists have a pretty bleak vision for the future. But how much damage can they do over the next four years? Well, to my mind, their understanding of the present is equally disturbing. Algorithmic supremacists show a disdain for the inefficient ways humans read, write, draw, compose, and create, wanting us to outsource those activities to machines that can spit out mathematical variations of what uncredited human artists produced with heart and soul.
David Weitzner, We must fight back against the rise of ‘algorithmic supremacists’ -
This recalls the early days of synthesizers; what was Switched-On Bach if not “I see what you did there”? I hope that analogy is right, because the synth provides a healthy, sustainable template for these tools (AI). Ubiquitous and unremarkable, controllable and hackable, with flavors ranging from fully corporate to gloriously DIY … I’m realizing, as I type this, that synthesizers might be one of the truly utopian technologies.
Robin Sloan, Notes on a Genre