Manifesto On How To Be Interesting Quotes

Being interesting isn't important. But being happy is. As well as being a person you're proud of

Life doesn't happen to you. You can't just sit on a park bench and expect amazing things to whizz by on a conveyor belt. Life is what you put into it.

Choose life. Choose love. And always remember to live.

Love, as always, is what it comes down to. You have to love. It's the only way. Love for life. Love for others. And, most importantly, love for yourself.

I'm terrified that my journey won't tie up all the loose ends nicely. Because this is a life, not just a story, and life doesn't always go the way stories tell you.

Time can be strange sometimes. It can leave imprints in particular places, leaving ghosts of memories trapped.

Look for someone who matches your soul (not who completes it): someone who flows through life like you do; someone who shares your interests, values, outlook, routine, and so on.”….”No one else completes you. Period. People come in and out of our lives to share them with us, contribute, support us, and teach us, but they never complete us.

Who cares what a writer looks like as long as their words are beautiful?

Trauma. It doesn't eke itself out over time. It doesn't split itself manageably into bite-sized chunks and distribute itself equally throughout your life. Trauma is all or nothing. A tsunami wave of destruction. A tornado of unimaginable awfulness that whooshes into your life - just for one key moment - and wreaks such havoc that, in just an instant, your whole world will never be the same again.

Reality doesn't wait for you to be ready for it. It doesn't go away when you tell it to. It's like a persistent mosquito, determined to suck your blood and leave you with a bumpy itch that you can't stop scratching.

Life is so bloody hard. I don't want the whole struggle to be pointless. If I'm going to get crap thrown at me from great heights my whole life, well, I want to damn well make sure I leave a mark on this world in exchange for all the misery.

Being interesting isn't important. But being happy is. As well as being a person you're proud of.

I will always try to live.

Nobody tells you that large houses have this horrible habit of making you feel utterly alone.

Writing's much more romantic when its pen and ink and paper. It's... More timeless. and worthwhile. Think about it. There are so many words gushing out into the universe these days. All digitally. All in Comic Sans or Times New Roman. Silly Websites. Stupid news stories digitally uploaded to a 24-hour channel. Where's all this writing going? Who's keeping a note of it all? Who's in charge of deciding what's worthwhile and what isn't? But back then... Back then, if someone wanted to write something they had to buy paper. Buy it! And ink. And a pen. And they couldn't waste too many sheets cos it was expensive. So when people wrote, they wrote because it was worthwhile... not just because they had some half-baked idea and they wanted to pointlessly prove their existence by sharing it on some bloody social networking site.

...above all, let your focus be on remaining a full person. Take time for yourself. Nurture your own needs. Please do not think of it as 'doing it all'. Our culture celebrates the idea of women who are able to 'do it all' but does not question the premise of that praise. I have no interest in the debate about women doing it all because it is a debate that assumes that caregiving and domestic work are singularly female domains, and idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and caregiving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not whether a woman can 'do it all' but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home.

With those you aim to serve or lead, your job is to be interested, to help make another person shine, not demonstrate how smart or good or capable you yourself are.

But what if you needed to get what you want... just once?

My life is so crap that i cant even think of ten stupid things that can give me reason not to be miserable.

It's not going to be easy. But then interesting things never are, are they?

The bottom line is that our government is not intelligent about how it pursues the public interest, because its decisions are not informed decisions (and its interest is generally not the public's).

She needed to understand her pain and why it had brought her here.

One might think that after this trenchant diagnosis of the radical dualism in human thinking, Huxley would urge us to take truth seriously and lean against any way in which we may be tempted to rationalize our needs—as Plato and Aristotle would have recommended. Instead, bizarrely, he goes on to take the very approach he was attacking. He freely admits that he “took it for granted” that the world had no meaning, but he did not discover it, he decided it. “I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.”7 His philosophy of meaninglessness was far from disinterested. And the reason? “We objected to morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”8 This admission is extraordinary. To be sure, Huxley and his fellow members of the Garsington Circle near Oxford were not like the Marquis de Sade, who used the philosophy of meaninglessness to justify cruelty, rape and murder. But Huxley’s logic is no different. He too reached his view of the world for nonintellectual reasons: “It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence.” After all, he continues in this public confessional, “The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants, or why his friends should seize political power and govern in a way they find most advantageous to themselves.”9 The eminent contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel is equally candid. He admits that his deepest objection to Christian faith stems not from philosophy but fear. I am talking about something much deeper—namely the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.10 At least there is no pretense in such confessions. As Pascal wrote long ago, “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.”11 In Huxley’s case there is no clearer confession of what Ludwig Feuerbach called “projection,” Friedrich Nietzsche called the “will to power,” Sigmund Freud called “rationalization,” Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith,” and the sociologists of knowledge call “ideology”—a set of intellectual ideas that serve as social weapons for his and his friends’ interests. Unwittingly, this scion of the Enlightenment pleads guilty on every count, but rather than viewing it as a confession, Huxley trumpets his position proudly as a manifesto. “For myself, no doubt, as for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation.”12 Truth

People employ what economists call “rational ignorance.” That is, we all spend our time learning about things we can actually do something about, not political issues that we can’t really affect. That’s why most of us can’t name our representative in Congress. And why most of us have no clue about how much of the federal budget goes to Medicare, foreign aid, or any other program. As an Alabama businessman told a Washington Post pollster, “Politics doesn’t interest me. I don’t follow it. … Always had to make a living.” Ellen Goodman, a sensitive, good-government liberal columnist, complained about a friend who had spent months researching new cars, and of her own efforts study the sugar, fiber, fat, and price of various cereals. “Would my car-buying friend use the hours he spent comparing fuel-injection systems to compare national health plans?” Goodman asked. “Maybe not. Will the moments I spend studying cereals be devoted to studying the greenhouse effect on grain? Maybe not.” Certainly not —and why should they? Goodman and her friend will get the cars and the cereal they want, but what good would it do to study national health plans? After a great deal of research on medicine, economics, and bureaucracy, her friend may decide which health-care plan he prefers. He then turns to studying the presidential candidates, only to discover that they offer only vague indications of which health-care plan they would implement. But after diligent investigation, our well-informed voter chooses a candidate. Unfortunately, the voter doesn’t like that candidate’s stand on anything else — the package-deal problem — but he decides to vote on the issue of health care. He has a one-in-a-hundred-million chance of influencing the outcome of the presidential election, after which, if his candidate is successful, he faces a Congress with different ideas, and in any case, it turns out the candidate was dissembling in the first place. Instinctively realizing all this, most voters don’t spend much time studying public policy. Give that same man three health insurance plans that he can choose from, though, and chances are that he will spend time studying them. Finally, as noted above, the candidates are likely to be kidding themselves or the voters anyway. One could argue that in most of the presidential elections since 1968, the American people have tried to vote for smaller government, but in that time the federal budget has risen from $178 billion to $4 trillion.

You're different, that's all. And I know it feels like it's you, but it's really not. You're a special person and you deserve happiness. Just because you don't fit in with all the other millionaires' offspring doesn't make you the problem. It's another world out there and it will suit you better.

John, Heard about you while looking up Marketing Directors for major hospitals and love your backstory - incredible that you work as a volunteer firefighter as well. I specialize in iOS development for the healthcare industry. Recently, we built an app for Johns Hopkins that has increased their patient happiness rating by 75% through an automated dashboard. Interested in improving your patient happiness at Baylor? Let me know and I’ll send over some times to chat. Thanks, Alex

The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

Ukeles’s interest in maintenance was partly occasioned by her becoming a mother in the 1960s. In an interview, she explained, “Being a mother entails an enormous amount of repetitive tasks. I became a maintenance worker. I felt completely abandoned by my culture because it didn’t have a way to incorporate sustaining work.” In 1969, she wrote the “Manifesto for Maintenance Art”, an exhibition proposal in which she considers her own maintenance work as the art. She says, “I will live in the museum and do what I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition…My working will be the work.”25

Maybe love - real love - is mellow. A slow-cooking stew only just simmering on the hob, but if you leave it long enough the flavour deepens and deepens. Maybe it´s your favourite song being played on a really low volume, but it doesn´t matter because you know the words and melody so well you can sing it in your head.

. . . The 2018 Democracy Project, . . . . asked fourteen hundred adults about the importance of democracy as our form of government. Among respondents aged twenty-nine or younger, only 30 percent said "absolutely important." Overall, only 60 percent of those polled expressed absolute adamancy. When asked if America is in "real danger of becoming a nondemocratic, authoritarian country," overall, 50 percent said yes. Half of us are in fear of democracy's collapse? How in the world did we get there? Well, I have a detailed answer to that question, and then I further presume to prescribe a solution--a solution that has little to do with the actions of government, quite a bit to do with the imperatives of the marketplace, and most of all to do with you, the citizen. So yes, "American Manifesto" is a call to action but it requires maybe a more challenging commitment: to be prepared to discard, or at least reconsider, aspects of your own personal orthodoxy, your assumptions, your affinities, and maybe even one or two articles of faith. Because the time for narrow interests, and the time for delicacy, has passed. This is an emergency. It's time for all the king's horses and all the king's men to get fucking busy. Please note also: I am not inciting a revolution. I am outlining a de-devolution.

What are the “proud and lofty” things of contemporary cultures? To what do nations and peoples point in showing off their “honor” and “glory”? It would be interesting, for example, to count how many times those very words – “honor” and “glory” and their variants and equivalents – are used in our own day at national festivals and political rallies. The variants are seemingly endless. “National honor.” “Our honor is at stake.” “We are gathered today to honor those who...” “Our glorious heritage.” “Our glorious flag.” “What a glorious nation we live in!” People boast about the nations of which they are citizens. They also boast about ethnic identities, religious affiliations, race, gender, and clan. They point in pride to natural wonders they claim as their own possessions – “This land was made for you and me.” They show off their military might, their economic clout, their material abundance. The Lord of hosts has a day against all of these things: against nations who brag about being “Number One,” against racist pride, against the idealizing of “human potential,” against our self-actualization manifestos, against our reliance on missiles and bombers, against art and technology, against philosophy textbooks and country music records, against Russian vodka and South African diamonds, against trade centers and computer banks, against throne-rooms and presidential memorabilia. In short, God will stand in judgment of all idolatrous and prideful attachments to military, technological, commercial, and cultural might. He will destroy all of those rebellious projects that glorify oppression, exploitation, and the accumulation of possessions. It is in such projects that we can discern today our own ships of Tarshish and cedars from Lebanon.

The fact that Costa Rica comes top of the HPI is both surprising and interesting. The data tells us just how well they are doing. Average life expectancy is 78.5 years; this is higher than the US, where it is only 77.9 years. Its ecological footprint is only 2.3 gHa, less than half that of the UK and a quarter that of the US, and only just over its global fair share which would be 2.1gHa. Meanwhile, largely unnoticed, Costa Ricans actually have the highest life satisfaction score globally, according to the 2008 Gallup World Poll, at 8.5 out of 10.0. What are they doing right in Costa Rica? Why are they so satisfied with life? A full answer is worth a book of its own, but here some clues: – They have one of the most developed welfare systems outside of Scandinavia, with clean water and adult literacy almost universal. – The army was abolished in 1949 and the monies freed up are spent on social programs. – There is a strong “core economy” of social networks of family, friends, and neighborhoods made possible by a sensible work/life balance and equal treatment of women. – It is a beautiful country with rich, protected, natural capital. There is clearly much we can learn from Costa Rica, and that is before we consider its environmental credentials: 99% of electricity is from renewable resources (mainly hydro); there is a carbon tax on emissions; and deforestation has been dramatically reversed in the last 20 years.

And always remember to live.

I'm boring. I'm a nobody. I don't live life. I don't embrace life.

Pain, loneliness, darkness.

Do you think maybe your writing isn't going anymore because you're unhappy? Because you're not living the life you could? A life worth writing about? You must know that cliche-write what you know-but what do you know, Bree, when you shut the world out?

Music industry defenders of streaming muzak like to point out that artists themselves have been making functional music for decades. The argument usually begins by pointing to Brian Eno’s 1978 Ambient 1: Music for Airports, widely considered the first ambient record, which came with a manifesto outlining how ambient “must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” For example, the cofounder of Endel, a German app that builds on the logic of the functional playlist boom by generating “personalized functional soundscapes,” cites Eno as his biggest influence.10 Today’s functional music front-runners seem to miss something essential about the history of ambient, though, and the traditions it draws from and helped shape. For his part, Eno claims to have conceptualized ambient as a direct response to the cultural pervasiveness of Muzak, rather than a recreation of it. He called ambient music “an atmosphere or a surrounding influence: a tint,” which he created to suit “a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.” In Eno’s explanation of it, consummate artists were not supposed to make background music, and he asked, why not? “I use it to make the space that I want to live in.”11