“We live in a society where we are all acting, even though we are not actors.”
“Nothing is wrong with you. Your environment has quietly changed.”
Source: The Age of Drift: Why Modern Life Feels Fake – and What Reality Drift Reveals About the Modern Mind
“Hrubý národní produkt nebere v úvahu zdraví našich dětí, kvalitu jejich vzdělání nebo radost jejich her. Nezahrnuje krásu naší poezie nebo stabilitu našich manželství, inteligenci veřejné debaty nebo politickou soudržnost... zkrátka měří všechno, jen ne to, co činí život hodnotným.”
“Of course, being crazy can instead be a stubborn expression of self-destructive willfulness. There appear to be many people who choose to go crazy (or become alcoholics, addicts, criminals, suicides) rather than have to bear the pain and ambiguity of a life situation that they have decided that they cannot stand. With such patients, I try to make clear that I cannot prevent their going mad, but that I will not follow their madcap course from home to hospital and back. They may have any crazy feelings and ideas they wish, but in their community they have to act as if they were sane, if they want me to accompany them on their pilgrimage. The irresponsible act of going crazy, in order not to have to face up to the mess they have created in their own lives, is not one to which I wish to be an accomplice.”
Source: If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients
“At that moment, for the first time ever, I felt I'd become a part in the machine of society. I've been reborn, I thought. That day, I actually became a normal cog in society.”
Source: Convenience Store Woman
“So that was it: now that she thinks he's "one of us" she can lecture him. She's far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality--however messy--is far more comprehensible”
Source: Convenience Store Woman
“Silicon Valley’s obsessive overhyping of “artificial intelligence”—by which they mean jumped-up large language models fueled by venture capital and systematic plagiarism—probably has far more to do with the Homo economicus boss’s fantasies of the robotic ideal worker than it does with the likely actual benefits, to most people, of such technologies. We have built a society that needs us to be machines!”
Source: Why Christians Should Be Leftists
“When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)”
Source: The world according to Garp
“There is wisdom in the fact that much in the world smells ill: disgust itself creates wings and water-divining powers!”
Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
“While in the past the newsreaders would speak in clam voices conveying reassurance and balanced consideration. Now they spoke in shrill tones that created panic in a viewers heart. They created the disaster before it had occurred.”
Source: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny