Hank Green Quotes

because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.

Humanity is good. Some people are terrible and broken, but humanity is good. I believe that.

Being silly is still allowed, not excluded by adulthood. What's excluded by adulthood is thoughtlessness, so be thoughtful and silly

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.

You are always a little bit wrong

I had a very happy childhood; I just wasn’t a very happy child.

Read books. Care about things. Get excited. Try not to be too down on youself. Enjoy the ever present game of knowing.

Even on this most terrible days, even when the worst of us are all we can think of, I am proud to be a human.

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

We are all differently broken, semi-functional, rusted out love machines

Just because someone has power over you doesn’t mean they’re going to use it to hurt you. People who believe that tend to either be: People who have been victims of that sort of behavior, or . . . People who, if given power, will use it to hurt you.

You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you're pretending to be.

In the contemporary world where things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold, you have to imagine a community where there is no centre. Hank, at the end of this year I started thinking that a lot of life is about doing things that don’t suck with people who don’t suck.

Just because you can't imagine something doesn't mean you can't do it.

It turns out, somehow, there are a tremendous number of things to be optimistic about.

The power that each of us has over complete strangers to make them feel terrible and and frightened and weak is amazing.

Think of people as people, not problems that need to be solved.

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.

I live in the present due to the constraints of the time-space continuum.

What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way?

John Green is a very handsome, intelligent, and wise man. He smells really weird though.

Knowing something is a bad idea does not always decrease the odds that you will do 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.

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.

As is often the case, it was the easier choice to make and the more difficult choice to live with.

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.

When you’re faced with something you don’t understand, I think the most natural thing but also the least interesting thing you can be is afraid,

I’d heard all this before, but I also knew that this line of argument worked. If you tell people that they’re being attacked for their beliefs, then suddenly they want to defend their beliefs, even if they didn’t really believe them before. It’s pretty amazing, really.

Don't worry about looking cool. Do you because you are awesome.

As Alaska zipped through something obvious about linear equations, stoner/baller Hank Walsten said, "Wait, wait. I don't get it." "That's because you have eight functioning brain cells." "Studies show that Marijuana is better for your health than those cigarettes," Hank said. Alaska swallowed a mouthful of fries, took a drag on her cigarette, and blew a smoke at Hank. "I may die young," she said. "But at least I'll die smart. Now, back to tangents.

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

The most insidious part of fame for April wasn't that other people dehumanized her; it was that she dehumanized herself. She came to see herself not as a person but as a tool.

It turns out pundits don’t want to talk about what’s happened; they want to use what’s happened to talk about the same things they talk about every day.

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

Hank, when people call people nerds mostly what they're saying is,'You like stuff'.

Bravery is not strength in the face of a far lesser foe. Bravery is the exact opposite of that.

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.

I don't think any of us are blameless when we all, more and more often, see ourselves not as members of a culture but as weapons in a war.

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

We are each individual, but the far greater thing is what we are together, and if that isn't protected and cherished, we are headed to a bad place.

Cricket

Next time you have a bad day, remember that it is amazing that you are alive at all, much less a member of a self-aware species living at the height of human technological progress.

We need more completely sane people doing completely crazy things.

... I called my brother, Hank, and told him I was feeling frightened. Hank is the levelheaded one, the sane one, the calm one. He always has been. We have never let the fact of my being older get in the way of Hank being the wise older brother.

In retrospect Hank I don't know why I spent four years writing this book when I could have just made a hit sing-a-ma-jig album.

I think, therefore I am, dangerous.

Just move toward the back wall. There's less fire there." "My new favorite kind of fire.

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

Basically, do your best to mock and deride their connection to and appreciation of you because, deep down, you dislike yourself enough that you cannot imagine anyone worthwhile actually wanting to be with you. I mean, if they like you, there must be something wrong with them, right?

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.

We are all bat people.

I know that that doesn't make even a little bit of sense. That was the point, that beautiful incongruence.

That entire conversation had the feeling of a pleasant stroll inches away from the edge of the Grand Canyon.

Solve more problems than you create.

Don't forget to be awesome

My annoyance became frustration, which became anger, which became hate, and hate is a long-burning fuel.

I think the Carls, maybe they didn't pick you because of who you were but because of who you could become." "That's a nice thing to say, though I don't know that I love what I've become." "Maybe you're not done yet.

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.

Life is a lot like pizza… But in fact, Hank, the fundamental thing that all critical reading does is reveal to us there are not easy definitions that distinguish us from them. Reading with an eye toward metaphor allows us to become the person we’re reading about while reading about them. That’s why there are symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if the author intended a symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author’s intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into other people as we see ourselves, and when we do that we can look out at the world and see a giant endless set of beautiful variations of pizzas; the whole world composed of billions of beautiful, delicious pizzas.

The infernal day star is shining its radiation down upon us. I can feel it giving me cancer.

Bring People together and promote a simple change and a better world.

The satisfaction? The joy? That comes from solving problems and making things.

The truest strength is shouldering the burden of care.

I don't even know what it would be like to not be attracted to a person because of their gender.

At LeakyCon, a young lady asked me how I dealt with bullying. I wasn’t able to give her a very good answer, which troubles me. Well, there were lots of shouts of “It gets better” and “Stay strong” and “We love you”. But when I put myself back in time to when I was being bullied, none of those things would’ve helped me. Yes, absolutely it does get better. But when you are being physically and psychologically tortured, it is difficult to remove yourself from the pressingness of the moment at hand. Here’s how I dealt with bullying: I cried, I hated myself, I hated my life. I didn’t deal with it, I survived it, but I never dealt with it. So here are two tips from someone with lots of experience. 1: It’s not about you, it has nothing to do with you, it’s about the assholes doing it to you. 2: Your job is not to deal with it, your job is to survive it, which you CAN do because it WILL end. And then yes, it will get better.

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.

Good morning Hank,it's Tuesday.

I do things that are bad for myself, and my friends, and my health, and my world so I can get more power because I think I need that power to do good things.

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.

It’s so much easier for people to get excited about disliking something than agreeing to like it. The circle jerk of mockery and self-congratulation was so intense I didn’t even notice I was at its center. It was so easy to get people to follow me, and in the end, that’s what I wanted.

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

I follow and cultivate my own curiosity. I think curiosity is one of the top two or three human characteristics. It's something that I really like about myself. [...] I want to understand stuff! I want to understand people! Following my curiosity so frequently leads me to better life decisions and better business decisions but also - just feeling better! You're never going to feel bad about your whole life if you loved people and you were curious. I mean, that's kind of all I want!

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

Well, if I weren't so insecure, I would have had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to spend every day of my life getting really good at seeming confident.

I saw myself as a leader of the community, not a member. I had no idea what a messed-up perspective that was at the time.

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

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.

The comments on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter instantly switched from a small, friendly, supportive community to a selection of the loudest, most over-the-top opinions one could imagine. I was a traitor to my species. I was ultra-fuckable. I was a space alien. I was an ultra-fuckable space alien. And so on.

I was really, deeply, honestly, and truly infatuated with having people pay attention to me.

Any good story is a mind-altering substance.

You do not exist to please someone else. You exist for your own sake.

We are the superhero. None of us, individually, but all of us together.

A friend of mine once told me that, no matter how much you proofread, the first time you open the final version of your book, you will find a typo on the very first page you look at. Ugh.

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

...the world is complicated and it deserves to be understood complexly.

The local news does a story about it and everyone goes “Neat!” and then tomorrow we forget about it in favor of some other ABSOLUTELY PERFECT AND REMARKABLE THING.

Every black person who spends time with a lot of white people eventually ends up being asked to speak for every black person,

I miss that life so much I would end every panda to get it back.

You’re just trying to find an audience who will love you and I’m not enough.

We are each individuals, but the far greater thing is what we are together, and if that isn't protected and cherished, we are headed to a bad place.

Humanity, what do you think of us?" "Beautiful," Carl replied.

You’re talking about yourself like you’re a tool, but you’re a person too. And an evolving one. This will affect your life forever.

As I was saying, even on this most terrible of days, even when the worst of us are all we can think of, I am proud to be a human.

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.

People were going to read it and, I hoped, maybe some minds would be changed. Ultimately, almost everyone who read that book was already on my side, and the only thing it served to do was make people like me angrier.

Maya was the most effective talker I knew. It was like she wrote essays in her brain and then recited them verbatim. She once explained to me that she thought this was part of being Black in America. “Every black person who spends time with a lot of white people eventually ends up being asked to speak for every black person,” she told me one night after it was too late to still be talking, “and I hate that. It’s really stupid. And everyone gets to respond to that idiocy however they want. But my anxiety eventually made me extremely careful about everything I said, because of course I don’t represent capital-B Black People, but if people think I do, then I still feel a responsibility to try to do it well.

So here’s a really stupid thing about the world: The trick to looking cool is not caring whether you look cool. So the moment you achieve perfect coolness is simultaneously the moment that you actually, completely don’t care. I didn’t care about the gravitas of that TV show, and the freedom and security and confidence that came with that was a rush. It took me a while to realize that the feeling I was feeling was power.

Do you know what we do with liars in Chemistry? We kill them.

Their constant attacks meant I never had to doubt my message.

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.

Manhattan is less legit than it once was, for sure, but this is still the city that never sleep. It is also the city of ‘Behold the field in which I grow my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is barren.

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.

But one thing that I didn’t anticipate was that, in creating the April May brand, I was very much creating a new me. You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you’re pretending to be.

I’m not much older now than I was then, but in a lot of ways, obviously, I’m a different person. So it is easy for me to recognize that I made some good decisions and some bad ones. But it’s telling that, with this, I knew it was a bad idea even then but I still couldn’t control myself. Knowing something is a bad idea does not always decrease the odds that you will do it. If I had examined my motivations on this one, I probably wouldn’t have liked what I found, so I didn’t.

I read to occupy a mind other than my own

Being annoyed by carefully crafted internet personas was part of my carefully crafted internet persona. Even

Much of the best art is about balancing between reflecting culture while simultaneously being removed from it and commenting on it. In

If I had examined my motivations on this one, I probably wouldn’t have liked what I found, so I didn’t.

Human beings are terrible at accepting uncertainty, so when we’re ignorant, we make assumptions based on how we imagine the world.

He was one of thousands of people who scraped by filtering reality through their ideology and then yelling really loudly at the internet.

You know what they didn’t do, though? They didn’t, not one single time, say, “What were you thinking?!” Not because they knew or because they understood—I really don’t think they did. They didn’t ask that because I sure as hell didn’t stab myself in the back, and when a radical extremist stabs someone in the back, the only person at fault is the radical extremist.

To me it just seemed like that incurable ailment so many well-off dudes have, believing despite mountains of evidence that what the world truly needs is another white-guy comedy podcast.

Just because someone has power over you doesn’t mean they’re going to use it to hurt you. People who believe that tend to either be: People who have been victims of that sort of behavior, or . . . People who, if given power, will use it to hurt you.

The most insidious party of fame for April wasn't that other people dehumanized her; it was that she dehumanized herself. She came to see herself not as a person but as a tool. And if that tool wasn't being used, sharpened, refined, or strengthened at every opportunity, then she was letting the world down.

The story of humanity is not a story of a few people who had huge, gigantic effects on the world. That's only the story we hear, because it's the easy story to tell. Caring for ourselves and other people is the only thing that has ever mattered to the future of our species.

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.

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

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

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

The realization that we were actually doing this, and what it could result in, never really struck me. We just did it.

You say that, but have you played Cherry Blossom Fairy Five, April May? Have you?

Frankly, I've worked my whole life to not be adorable with only limited success, and two adorable people dating is waaaay too cute for me.

You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you’re pretending to be.

Reasoned, caring conversations that considered the complexity of other perspectives didn’t get views. Rants did. Outrage did. Simplicity did.

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

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

You do the things you have to do in the order you have to do them.

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

Every person who reads your book will be far more likely to be on your side. Books are the most intensive of all current media. People are willing to spend hours and hours with a book.

John: What is the point of being alive? Hank: You taught me this: There isn't one unless you decide on one. And sometimes you don't know you're deciding and you're deciding anyway. John: And what did I decide? Hank: I think it's a combination of making stupid podcasts with your brother, writing lovely things, and taking care of your family. And also educating people. John: Alright. Yeah, that works. I think I can live with that.

The Carls were the perfect vector for disagreement because, through all of this, we still knew practically nothing about them. Governments were accused of hiding things because people just couldn’t accept that those in power were exactly as lost as the rest of us. Human beings are terrible at accepting uncertainty, so when we’re ignorant, we make assumptions based on how we imagine the world. And our guess is so obviously correct that other guesses seem, at best, willful ignorance—at worst, an attack.

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.

We are irrational beings, easy to manipulate if you're willing to do whatever it takes. That's exactly how terrorists convince themselves that murder is worthwhile. And the wound it left, it was larger than those lives lost; it was a wound we would all have to live with forever. The purity of my feeling for Carl was gone and I would never get it back.

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.

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

I also remember defining myself by the people and the things that I hated rather than what I liked, thinking that it was cooler to be jaded than to be careful with other people.

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

And that was a job at a doomed start-up funded by the endless well of rich people who can only dream the most boring dream a rich person can dream: being even more rich.

The power that each of us has over complete strangers to make them feel terrible and frightened and weak is amazing

Oakland Carl was the only Carl in the San Francisco Bay Area, and San Franciscans were, frankly, offended.

My phone felt like it weighed ten pounds in my hands, and I almost fell asleep, but then I realized I’d been neglecting Facebook,

But when you walked out of that building, you created a new history that we have to live in now.

Fear is an even better fuel than anger.

Knock Knock

The clattering of humanity mixed in all its randomness was as relaxing to me as crickets chirping beside a rushing brook.

It’s so much harder to actually define yourself and work to imagine the best possible future than it is to tear down others’ ideas.

The power that each of us has over complete strangers to make them feel terrible and frightened and weak is amazing.

Power only does all its business of empowering when it's perceived as a difference between the power of those nearby and, even more important, the power one previously had.

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".

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.

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.

Like any good teacher, she tolerated little dissension. She smoked and talked and ate for an hour without stopping, and I scribbled in my notebook as the muddy waters of tangents and cosines began to clarify. But not everyone was so fortunate. As Alaska zipped through something obvious about linear equations, stoner/baller Hank Walsten said, "Wait, wait. I don't get it." "That's because you have eight functioning brain cells." "Studies show that marijuana is better for your health than those cigarettes," Hank said. Alaska swallowed a mouthful of french fries, took a drag on her cigarette, and blew smoke across the table at Hank. "I may die young," she said. "But at least I'll die smart. Now, back to tangents.

It's weird to talk about these things as if they are fact since they were in a dream, but the fact that everyone experienced it in precisely the same way made it feel concrete. What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way? The Dream, in that sense, was very, very real.

But when you walked out of that building, you created a new history that we have to live in now." She did not say this as something I should be proud of, more something that I had to live with. The dart hit its mark.

Toward the back of the small property, Twentymile Creek flows through a ravine two to three feet deep and three times as wide. The waters of the creek, high and vigorous from recent rains, purl noisily around stones bearded with green moss and swatched with lichen. There she finds the body, stretched across the frothing stream.

Just working through what other people had done gave me a feeling that this was all actually worth it. When you get stuck fighting small battles, it makes you small. Hopping from cable news show to cable news show to discuss controversy after controversy had made me small. I thought only about the fight, not why I was fighting.

Not that I wasn’t also having fun. Ripping the Defenders’ arguments to shreds and then reading all the comments agreeing passionately with me and electronically patting me on my cybershoulders was thrilling. It’s so much harder to actually define yourself and work to imagine the best possible future than it is to tear down others’ ideas.

Here’s a quick overview of what happens when groups of passionate believers start to define themselves in opposition to others: A simple message seems obvious to a large population, and those people can’t understand what the opposition could possibly be thinking. They never or almost never engage with someone who holds those different beliefs, and if they do, it’s in the context of the discussion, not in the context of, like, also being a human. The vast majority of those people nod appreciatively and then change the channel and watch NCIS and eat the tacos that they made. It’s their own recipe. They’ve developed it over years, and they like it better than any taco you could get at even a super fancy restaurant. They go to bed at 10: 30 and worry a bit about whether their son is adjusting well to college. A very small percentage get really riled up. They’re angry, but they’re mostly worried or even scared and want to cause some kind of action. They call their representatives and do a little organizing. They’re usually motivated not just by agreement in the message but by a hatred of the people trying to fight the message. A tiny percentage of that percentage just go way the fuck overboard. They get so frightened and angry that they need to make something happen. How? Well, that’s simple, right? You eliminate the people who are actively trying to destroy the world. If we’re all really unlucky, and if there are enough of them, those people find each other and they confirm and exacerbate their own extremism.

We got here the only way people get anywhere good: together

Being annoyed by carefully crafted internet personas was part of my carefully crafted internet persona.

They had jackhammered under the one in Oakland. It remained there, hanging above the space where the sidewalk had been.

And frustrating because, good lord god almighty, I know that you are a good person, but the last thing you need is some other sign from heaven that you are special.” She sighed.

When you're faced with something you don't understand, I think the most natural but also the least interesting thing you can beis afraid.

Here’s a hint: It’s not really “news” until they stop running ads.

We are each individuals, but the far greater thing is what we are together, and if that isn’t protected and cherished, we are headed to a bad place.

Human beings are terrible at accepting uncertainty, so when we’re ignorant, we make assumptions based on how we imagine the world. And our guess is so obviously correct that other guesses seem, at best, willful ignorance—at worst, an attack.

Sometimes it seems to me that the purpose of life is to convert energy into beauty. And I know that's not rationally true. But sometimes it's okay for things not to be rationally true.

It’s basically just like every other room full of people you’ve ever been in, except exactly half of it looks extremely fancy and important, and the other half is just concrete and scaffolding.

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.

Where is the president at this Time of Need! Probably playing shuffleboard or having her period!’ It’s not my fault I like shuffleboard so much. I always say, add up all the time every other president has spent golfing and tell me that my shuffleboard habit is bad for America.

Did you see a large robotic hand run by here just now?" I said, having caught enough of my breath to speak. "Hmm?" he said, as if he were just realizing we were talking to him. "Ah. Yes, it just went inside." "What?" "Well, it walked up and looked around as if it wanted to go inside, so I let it inside. It had not strictly obeyed the dress code, but while the rules are both specific and comprehensive, I thought it made sense to allow an exception in the case of an autonomous hand.

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.

You're never happy if [your main focus in life is that] you want to be happy. Then you're always thinking about whether you're happy. You have to find some other thing that isn't happiness that makes you happy that you focus on.

Hank Green's Secrets of Productivity: 1.) I have convinced myself that if I am not using all of the tools I have in my disposal to do the maximum amount of good [...] then I am less of a good person than I could otherwise could be. [...] 2.) I intentionally put myself in situations where people who I care about and who I respect rely on me to do things, which is very motivating. [...] 3.) I don't get caught up in doing everything perfectly. [...] I just want to try stuff and if it explodes... it exploded! And I learned! 4.) I love giving other people responsibility. I love putting them in difficult situations and saying: "Figure this out. Help me do this." And if they do it wrong or if they do it differently than how I would have done it, I don't get mad as long as they're learning, because there's no way to get good at stuff except to do it and fail and learn. [...] 5.) I follow and cultivate my own curiosity. I think curiosity is one of the top two or three human characteristics. It's something that I really like about myself. [...] I want to understand stuff! I want to understand people! Following my curiosity so frequently leads me to better life decisions and better business decisions but also - just feeling better! You're never going to feel bad about your whole life if you loved people and you were curious. I mean, that's kind of all I want!

There was a bit of that “Oh my god, they’ve got three dimensions and a size and a shape and I’m seeing a person with my own eyes that I have previously only seen through the eyes of cameras” feeling that you get with any famous person. That’s a weird thing, and it’s a very interesting and complex experience.

How do we measure up?" I asked, seriously, and with conviction. "I don't understand," Carl said. "You came to observe us, to test our reactions. Did we pass your tests?" "I don't understand," Carl said again. I struggled to rephrase the question. "Humanity, what do you think of us?" "Beautiful," Carl replied.

I’d heard all this before, but I also knew that this line of argument worked. If you tell people that they’re being attacked for their beliefs, then suddenly they want to defend their beliefs, even if they didn’t really believe them before.

With morning came visitors. An hour after the Colonel left, resident stoner Hank Walsten dropped by to offer me some weed, which I graciously turned down. Hank hugged me and said, "At least it was instant. At least there wasn't any pain." I knew he was only trying to help, but he didn't get it. There was pain. A dull endless pain in my gut that wouldn't go away even when I knelt on the stingingly frozen tile of the bathroom, dry-heaving. And what is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.

The emptiness and silence of this apartment compounded by my knowledge that I was, for the first time in my life, the only person sleeping in my home. This forced me to realize that, while I wanted to be fiercely myself, I also wanted someone around to see me so it.

Hank Peters woke up in the early hours of the next morning from a dream of huge rats crawling out of an open grave, a grave which held the green and rotting body of Hubie Marsten, with a frayed length of manila hemp around his neck. Peters lay propped on his elbows, breathing heavily, naked torso slicked with sweat, and when his wife touched his arm he screamed aloud. EIGHT

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.

I'm stuck on this planet with you. And honestly, I'm glad. I've been exposed to a lot of awful people in the last few months, but I've met so many more that are amazing, thoughtful, generous, and kind. I honestly believe that is the human condition. And if the Carls are testing us, this final test is the hardest to accomplish. If you pay attention, there is only one story that makes sense, and that is one in which humanity works together more and more since we took over this planet. Yeah, we fuck it up all the time, yeah, there have been some massive steps backward, but look at us! We are one species now more than we have ever been. People fight against that, and they probably always will, but could there be any time in history when what Carl is asking would be more possible?

People will hate you for no reason, or for bad reasons, or even for good reasons. People are torn apart by fame, and this is far beyond what most of them deal with. You're talking about yourself like you're a tool, but you're a person too. And an evolving one. This will affect your life forever.

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.

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.

is amazing how disconcerting a single vile, manipulative person can be even if you have never and (hopefully) will never see them. The power that each of us has over complete strangers to make them feel terrible and frightened and weak is amazing. This was not the first time someone had made me feel this way, but it was the first time it had happened through the internet, and it was enough to make me want to withdraw from the whole thing

Even with all the threats, it was still somehow inconceivable to me that someone would actually try to kill me. Harass me? Sure. Threaten me? Yeah. Sue me? If they could find a reason! But murder? That shit’s for the movies. People don’t kill people! I mean, they do, obviously, I’ve seen a newspaper. It says something, maybe, about how my mind works that I had received literal death threats but never considered that someone would try to kill me.

Most power just looks like an easier-than-average life. It’s so built-in that people mostly don’t realize how powerful they are. Like, the average middle-class person in the US is one of the 3 percent richest people in the world. Thus, they’re probably one of the most powerful people in the world. But, to them, they feel completely average.

So let’s talk a little about April May’s theory of tiered fame. Tier 1: Popularity You are a big deal in your high school or neighborhood. You have a peculiar vehicle that people around town recognize, you are a pastor at a medium-to-large church, you were once the star of the high school football team. Tier 2: Notoriety You are recognized and/or well-known within certain circles. Maybe you’re a preeminent lepidopterist whom all the other lepidopterists idolize. Or you could be the mayor or meteorologist in a medium-sized city. You might be one of the 1.1 million living people who has a Wikipedia page. Tier 3: Working-Class Fame A lot of people know who you are and they are distributed around the world. There’s a good chance that a stranger will approach you to say hi at the grocery store. You are a professional sports player, musician, author, actor, television host, or internet personality. You might still have to hustle to make a living, but your fame is your job. You’ll probably trend on Twitter if you die. Tier 4: True Fame You get recognized by fans enough that it is a legitimate burden. People take pictures of you without your permission, and no one would scoff if you called yourself a celebrity. When you start dating someone, you wouldn’t be surprised to read about it in magazines. You are a performer, politician, host, or actor whom the majority of people in your country would recognize. Your humanity is so degraded that people are legitimately surprised when they find out that you’re “just like them” because, sometimes, you buy food. You never have to worry about money again, but you do need a gate with an intercom on your driveway. Tier 5: Divinity You are known by every person in your world, and you are such a big deal that they no longer consider you a person. Your story is much larger than can be contained within any human lifetime, and your memory will continue long after your earthly form wastes away. You are a founding father of a nation, a creator of a religion, an emperor, or an idea. You are not currently alive.

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.

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.

Every black person who spends time with a lot of white people eventually ends up being asked to speak for every black person and I hate that. It's really stupid. And everyone gets to respond to that idiocy however they want. But my anxiety eventually made me extremely careful about everything I said, because of course I don't represent capital-B Black People, but if people think I do, then I still feel a responsibility to try to do it well.

There was one that was very clearly creepier than the rest of the normal creepiness. It is amazing how disconcerting a single vile, manipulative person can be even if you have never and (hopefully) will never see them. The power that each of us has over complete strangers to make them feel terrible and frightened and weak is amazing. This was not the first time someone had made me feel this way, but it was the first time it had happened through the internet, and it was enough to make me want to withdraw from the whole thing for a moment.

Hank: This is my one beautiful existence, and over the course of my life I will spend years of my life watching television; years of my life pooping; years of my life on twitter. How ok is that? [...] One thing that I really want to get away from is the idea that time is wasted when you are not producing something. [...] John: I do think that there might be some value in asking yourself: "What do I want to do while I'm here? What do I want to do with my time?" And part of the answer for that should, I think, be: "I want to distract myself from the pain of meaninglessness.

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.