Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe. - AE
Happiness is more ephemeral than thought. Its ingredients are subtle, and there is no guarantee that a formula or recipe for joy can be written out or passed on or repeated even once again. Happiness evades capture, dissolving like a melody into the air, eluding even the most delicate, careful grasp. It frustrates any systemic search, responding better to random fossicking and oblique approaches, and its rewards are infuriatingly arbitrary, stingy or abundant by purest chance.
Life is perhaps after all simply this thing and then the next. We are all of us improvising. We find careful balance only to discover that gravity or stasis or love or dismay or illness or some other force suddenly tows us in an unexpected direction. We wake up to find that we have changed abruptly in a way that is peculiar and inexplicable. We are constantly adjusting, making it up, feeling our way forward, figuring out how to be and where to go next. We work it out, how to be happy, but sooner or later comes a change - sometimes something small, sometimes everything at once - and we have to start all over again, feeling our way back to a provisional state of contentment. -Anne Giardini
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Understanding the often unconscious nature of genetic control is the first step towards understanding that - in many realms, not just sex - we’re all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. The full scope of the logic will take some time to explain, but I don’t think I’m spoiling the end of the movie by noting here that the puppeteer seems to have exactly zero regard for the happiness of the puppets. - Robert Wright
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A man who has blown all his options can’t afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can’t afford to admit - no matter how often he’s reminded of it - that every day of his life takes him farther down a blind alley… There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes outraging the public decency. - HST
Life is perhaps after all simply this thing and then the next. We are all of us improvising. We find careful balance only to discover that gravity or stasis or love or dismay or illness or some other force suddenly tows us in an unexpected direction. We wake up to find that we have changed abruptly in a way that is peculiar and inexplicable. We are constantly adjusting, making it up, feeling our way forward, figuring out how to be and where to go next. We work it out, how to be happy, but sooner or later comes a change - sometimes something small, sometimes everything at once - and we have to start all over again, feeling our way back to a provisional state of contentment. -Anne Giardini
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Understanding the often unconscious nature of genetic control is the first step towards understanding that - in many realms, not just sex - we’re all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. The full scope of the logic will take some time to explain, but I don’t think I’m spoiling the end of the movie by noting here that the puppeteer seems to have exactly zero regard for the happiness of the puppets. - Robert Wright
****
A man who has blown all his options can’t afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can’t afford to admit - no matter how often he’s reminded of it - that every day of his life takes him farther down a blind alley… There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes outraging the public decency. - HST