We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.
A flourishing economy mostly depends on an unsatisfied population and a declining environment.
I see so many people intent on cramming something into every hour of their weekend as if doing nothing was an admission of slothfulness. And if they have kids, they push that culture onto them too. You need margins, kids need them even more. Minds need to wander a little.
a Gibsonian apocalypse: the end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.
Brilliant interview with William Gibson.
It’s like being inside the gigantic worm in The Empire Strikes Back. For a while, you can kid yourself that you’re not inside a gigantic worm, until it starts digesting you. Because the worm is “everywhere” in your field of vision, you can’t really tell the difference between it and the surface of the asteroid you think you landed on.
I really like this term "hyperobject" used to describe things you can mentally picture or think about but can't see as such. Like, for example, climate change.
Roughly 45 minutes into an online search for a vegetable peeler, I looked away from my screen to realize the kitchen had grown dark and the day turned to night. I thought to myself, this is a problem.
This feels exceedingly familiar.
With regard to my recent link to a post about high speed trains having negative effects on rail travel, it looks like a standard rail link may be coming back between Brussels and Paris thanks to low-cost German operator Flixtrain.
