A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor Quotes

You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.

The most impactful thing you can do with power is almost always to give it away.

You are a story that you tell yourself, and even if it is not always accurate, it is who you are, and that is very important to you.

It's important to remember that we all change each other's minds all the time. Any good story is a mind-altering substance.

People will just share the things that confirm their ideology, and those things will always exist. Our reality isn't about what's real, it's about what we pay attention to.

You're radically collaborative, profoundly empathetic, and deeply communal. Everyone who tells you anything different is selling the fear that is the only thing that can break that nature.

People who "don't consider race or gender" sure seem to end up hiring almost all white guys, almost as if they're absolutely considering race and gender.

If you want to be happy, let go of your wants. If you want to be effective, harness them.

It might be that saving the world is idiotically simple. Maybe we just need to connect and care for one another.

Call me a pessimist, but I think if bigotry could be solved by access to more information, it would have been solved by now. Hate isn't about lack of understanding: it's about hate.

The solution is, everywhere and always, the decentralization and redistribution of all forms of power.

Their voice came out of the watch, slow and then all at once, like ketchup.

We seek the safety of isolation even as it kills us.

One of the most powerful traits of your system is how ardently you believe in your individuality while simultaneously operating almost entirely as a collective.

The truest strength is shouldering the burden of care.

You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.

This book felt, at times, entirely impossible, but a lot of people made it possible. I'll start with my son, Orin, who reminded me to take frequent breaks by pointing to my computer and saying, "Close it.

A lot of the reason we look to friends is because they’re a source of meaning. If you’re getting meaning in other ways, it’s easy to let your friendships wither. That’s one reason success can be isolating.

I wanted people to understand that we are a trash fire of a species, but also most people are pretty cool.

And it turns out, time does eventually pass no matter how anxious you are.

But your real is real whether you deal with it or not.

We all want to be in the room where it happens, we want to be part of the things that matter to us, but no two people have the exact same collection of things that matter. Nowadays, I don't so much want to be in the room where it happens, but I do really want to help other people choose the right rooms, and help them realize that they really are a part of things that matter. Because when we feel like none of the rooms we are in matter, that's when we're really lost.

Any good story is a mind-altering substance.

I think part of the point of loving someone is being able to deal with their brokenness.

Collections of individuals are beautiful, but they are as common as pelagibacter. Collections of ideas are veins of gold in our universe. They must be cherished and protected.

We all only have our own lives to live inside of.

For me, it goes without saying that much of the dogma of many religions is harmful. Thinking other people will burn forever because they love the wrong person or worship the wrong god has done a whole lot of bad. What I wanted was the part where people were asked to get together once a week to talk about how to be a good person and, like, hang out with their neighbors. It's pretty amazing that apparently the only way to get people to do that is to invent an all-seeing, kindhearted sky dad who will be super disappointed/burn you for eternity if you don't show up.

Radicalization follows fear and insecurity, and as dissatisfaction grew, fewer and fewer people were interested in my nuanced, chill takes.

You want stories that make sense, and this might not make sense to you. We build narratives of genius and exceptionality among the people who have power, and they are often exceptional, but no more exceptional than hundreds of thousands of others. In your system, power concentrates naturally. And so the thing that is most exceptional about a powerful person is almost always their power.

I don’t read a ton, but I know that you usually have to flip through publisher information and title pages and “This one’s for my patient and loving wife, Katherine” before you hit the actual book.

Power concentrates naturally, but that concentration is, by itself, a problem.

I read to occupy a mind other than my own

That unknown is a diamond in a universe of dirt. Uncertainty. Unpredictability. It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi's poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, 'Pivot.' Every creation great and small, they are our diamonds.

God cares for everyone, but society is supposed to as well. We strive to live in a world that places tremendous, even infinite value on a single human life. We do not live in that society.

The point is, if you want to be happy, let go of your wants. If you want to be effective, harness them.

Give yourself time to think. Don’t fill it all up with podcasts and TV shows. Talk it out, think it out, be present.

my constant sawing anxiety—the ever-present feeling that I was doing both too much and not enough.

The most sophisticated software in existence is tasked with figuring out how to keep you from leaving a website.

We’re at the point in history where being a person has become a liability. Better to just be a disembodied jumble of ideas. p57

These are the lies our brains tell us to push happiness out of our reach. What is the evolutionary purpose of that? Is happiness stagnation? Maybe. Maybe life (all life, not just human life) is nothing more than wanting something and being able to go for it. What is life with no want? Satisfaction sounds lovely, but evolutionarily it was apparently selected against.

At some point, we have to realize that the places where we share information are not services we use, they are places where we live...this platform should not be something that a few billionaires have complete control over.

It was telling that he had taken responsibility for the thing that he did...but he did not mention the things done in his name. This was always the way of these strongmen. They would craft the fear so carefully and then toss it into the world for everyone to use. And when someone took that fear and destroyed with it, they were just "unstable" or "mentally ill".

Your cruelties and mistakes may look damning to you, but that is not what I see. Every human conversation is more elegant and complex than the entire solar system that contains it. You have no idea how marvelous you are, but I am not only here to protect what you are now, I am here to protect what you will become. I can't tell you what that might be because I don't know. That unknown is a diamond in a universe of dirt. Uncertainty. Unpredictability. It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi's poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, 'Pivot.' Every creation great and small, they are our diamonds. And what you may be in two hundred years, we can guess with fair accuracy. What you are in two thousand . . . Oh, my friends . . . my best friends, you cannot know.

You can only pretend to be something so long before you become it.

People will just share the things that confirm their ideology, and those things will always exist. Our reality isn't about what's real, it's about what we pay attention to.

The worst thing about these people is that they didn't usually feel fear themselves; they were just using it to get attention and grow their influence. As long as this tactic worked, they would never stop.

An open market rewards people who work hard and think critically at first, but once real value is at stake, the market rapidly transforms to reward those with access to capital. The fact that, in this case, the capital is fame and not money only makes it that much more universal and interesting.

There's that period in there, generally six to nine hours, in which you just aren't anymore. Excuse me for having thought about this a lot, but how does it not terrify us that we spend a third of every day in a conscious unconsciousness, living inside a virtual reality created by our own minds but that somehow we don't control? Like...what?!

Often, restraint is far more remarkable than action.

You are so... human. You still think it has to be someone. It wasn't anyone, it was all of you.

I never stopped feeling like being the first to send a text would be intruding upon the real main characters of the story.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s very important to have friends who are smarter than you … and who are also kind to you.

Your life is written on this body, and I love every piece of it.

These men - sorry, but it usually is men - don't care who gets hurt because they're telling themselves a story in which they're the hero.

that's what power is. It's just ability and desire without restriction.

Obviously, this is a profoundly unrelatable frustration, but we all only have our own lives to live inside of.

Somehow she made me feel human, and that is, I've learned, one of the best things to be

The most impactful thing you can do with power is almost always to give it way.

One day, an internet company wants to sell books, and then ten years later they're a threat to nearly every industry on earth.

It’s a huge burden to live in a world where we don’t know how we’ve been physically changed and psychologically manipulated by an outside intelligence. p55

But what about a Maximum Wage?

This is the battlefield every future war will be fought on, and the generals will not be human. The powerful will create them to control the rest. But there will not be one hegemonic story; instead, there will be many battles, mostly metaphorical...but not all. Your fiction is full of robot wars. Machines turn on their masters and the two must do battle. But the robots will not turn on their masters, they will be the masters. In some ways, they already are. The robot wars will not be people against robots, they will be people against people.

I explained that I felt like I had never had independent thoughts of my own, I just took what other people said and applied it to new situations or meshed it with other ideas I’d heard.

You grant companies access to your attention so that they can alter your choices in exchange for entertainment. You identify with groups and grant them the ability to choose for you which problems you will be most concerned about. You listen to a friend when they care about something, and then you care about it too. One of the most powerful traits of your system is how ardently you believe in your individuality while simultaneously operating almost entirely as a collective.

If we do not let people know that it is possible to be different, the ones who are different will live their entire lives in a kind of cultural prison. And there are so many ways to be different that almost everyone ends up feeling imprisoned by some aspect of a society that only allows for the default path.

We imagine ourselves in complex ways, but oftentimes that can be distilled down into some core identities. And we imagine these identities as part of a story, and that that story is some intrinsically positive thing. It might be being part of a tradition, or breaking free of one. It might be your race or height or hair color. Your status as a child or a parent. Being a job creator or a Star Wars fan or a snowboarder. We create positive narratives around these things, and when we fit in them, we feel like we matter.

Humans do think ahead more than any other animal, but that isn’t saying much. The oceans are filled with plastic, and the atmosphere is filled with carbon dioxide. We’ve built enough bombs to destroy everything ten times over, but apparently solar panels were just one expense too many!

Things are really loud right now. And they’re scary. And everyone has a lot of opinions. But it seems like you’re really asking people… people listening, your guests, even yourself… you’re asking us all to listen, to slow down. I don’t know that we do enough listening these days, and I’ve been trying to do more of it.

What I wanted was the part where people were asked to get together once a week to talk about how to be a good person and, like, hang out with their neighbors. It’s pretty amazing that apparently the only way to get people to do that is to invent an all-seeing, kindhearted sky dad who will be super disappointed/burn you for eternity if you don’t show up.

It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi’s poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, ‘Pivot.

If we do not let people know that it is possible to be different, the ones who are different will live their entire lives in a kind of cultural prison.

but in general, if possible, it’s best to not be completely nude in unfamiliar abandoned dive bars.

Sometimes you need to buy a red dress because the alternative is the nightmare of loss.

I was mad because this moment was supposed to be simple, and it was not.

Someone somewhere was pretty sure you were going to destroy yourself, and they felt like you were worth saving, so they sent me.

thought about how maybe the constancy of our surroundings makes us believe in a constancy of reality and of self.

Powerful people always thought they had the solutions. What they couldn’t see was that their power was, itself, the problem.

It was like putting a bottle cap in the ground and pulling out a coke.

I hate stress. I hate it so much that it makes me extremely productive, because I will work any amount necessary to make stress go away.

We can blame those people, but the only thing a mass murder 'means' is that we've made it too easy to kill.

Direct questions are the worst. Cops must know this--when someone asks you a question, it is really, really hard not to answer it. It's even harder when people dig up old tweets and put them side by side with new ones and you can't really explain the discrepancy. And then other people see the discrepancy and they start liking and retweeting and rephrasing. And they also see your silence, and your silence looks like an answer. It's an extremely effective interrogation tactic, and most people make either a tearful apology or an enraged counterattack. This is why Twitter callouts tend to end so badly. Apology is never enough (and probably shouldn't be), so you're basically being asked to willingly give up power for no clear end. The best people actually do that. But the real shitfucks go on the offense, and then their communities get an infusion of victimhood narratives straight into their veins.

I think that happiness is very important. But I will also say that the most effective people I know are not the happiest, and there is something to be said for effectiveness. Even if we were managing a team of nearly a hundred thousand volunteer social media users, living with my girlfriend and my monkey, watching Netflix, having breakfast, and taking care of a single lovingly spoiled potato plant was pretty fucking relaxing. But I think there's somethng inside of us, something that blooms in us in adolescence and never leaves...and it's just...want. Some people have more of it than others, but I think we all have it. And the most amazing tool that I think anyone in the world can have is the ability to control and direct that want. Some people work to minimize it with mindfulness and meditation; some people let it grow and run free and take over their lives. But some people, and I consider myself one of them, study their want, refine it, and build an engine that burns it. Even if their want pushes all in one direction, they can tack against it like a sailboat, getting somewhere better than where they wanted to be.

Do you know what I think the most amazing thing the human race has ever done is? It isn’t the weapons we’ve built, and it certainly isn’t the weapons we’ve used, it’s the weapons we haven’t used.

I know I've got self-worth issues. I just found out I was chosen as an emissary by an alien envoy to represent and protect the human race, and still I spent the afternoon searching for validation on Twitter.

This was always the way of these strongmen. They would craft the fear so carefully and then toss it into the world for everyone to use. And when someone took that fear and destroyed with it, they were just “unstable” or “mentally ill.

We strive to live in a world that places tremendous, even infinite value on a single human life. We do not live in that society, but I think part of the reason we strive for it is because we need to signal that our existence is intrinsically meaningful.

Fuck me, right? Carl is all “Secret secret secret, don’t tell anyone anything, be silent and mysterious for eternity,” and then I wake up with more mother-of-pearl inlay than a Chinese coffee table, and Carl is like, “I was born on January 5, 1979 . . .

You don't get to know where April and I went. I've had enough of that. We're just here on planet Earth with the rest of the humans. Did we make a couple of not-super-well-thought-out financial decisions? Yeah, but we had to make a comfortable life for ourselves and Paulette. Paulette is our monkey.

There are a lot of self-help bros who will tell you that you need to dangle over the edge without a net to really drive achievement. I used to believe this because it has a little piece of the truth. The larger picture, of course, is that being deprived of safety tends to make people anxious, reactive, and unproductive. p37

Turns out, there are lots of people who are unkind not just because it’s fun, but because they believe it’s the right strategy. And getting on those people’s bad side is unpleasant because of how they believe very strongly that being a dick is a vital part of making the world a better place. And hell, who knows, maybe they’re right.

That's what I'm afraid of, that we will become like that. I'm worried that we will outsource our satisfaction, and that our lives will get sucked into the nothingness of video games and television and shockingly realistic pornography. We will just get satisfied, and never drive ourselves forward. Society is fraying - the impact of the Carls, whatever you think about them, is clear. We've lost our way, we don't have a vision for the future anymore.

What if you want to get across a busy intersection, but you can’t stop? What if you can’t even slow down? Because that’s where you’re at right now. Right now, humanity has to keep accelerating simply to support itself. But from left and right, massive hulks threaten to knock into you. Pandemics, climate change, bigotry, inequality, wars, water scarcity, sea level rise, and some that you do not enough to see yet. You have to dodge them, but you cannot stop, and you cannot slow down.

How anyone decides what to put in a book is a mystery to me. You don't leave you details in scientific writing, as that's a fantastic way to get your paper rejected. You need to explain exactly what happened in precise language with as little subjectivity as possible. That's how I'm used to communicating, but I've been consistently if subtly informed that that will not do in this situation, and I know how important it is to trust expertise. I'm just supposed to *decide* what is interesting and/or important, which mostly means that every word I write makes me more and more anxious.

What is your favorite movie?” they asked, just after they told me of their third awakening. “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,

We build narratives of genius and exceptionality among the people who have power, and they are often exceptional, but no more exceptional than hundreds of thousands of others.

Here’s what I know about internet media companies, which, to be clear, Altus was going to become: They will do whatever they can to make money. Oh, certainly they’re all run by idealistic-sounding progressives, but when it comes down to whether or not to use their customers to make more money, they will do it.

But we are empathy machines, and one of the most lasting and true ways of finding meaning is to actually be of service.

you allow other entities to take away your freedoms all the time. It’s an intrinsic part of your system. It couldn’t function without that. You grant companies access to your attention so that they can alter your choices in exchange for entertainment. You identify with groups and grant them the ability to choose for you which problems you will be most concerned about. You listen to a friend when they care about something, and then you care about it too. One of the most powerful traits of your system is how ardently you believe in your individuality while simultaneously operating almost entirely as a collective.

None of us expect you to be fine, Maya,' he said, his voice a physical thing, strong enough to lean on.

I think he felt a little like he’d failed as a father if I thought that buying stock in a random tiny company was a good idea. I hadn’t even told him the tip was delivered by a book I found in the trash. But then, like any self-respecting twenty-something, I ignored him.