When I was younger, I couldn’t get enough of books on physics, astronomy, and anything related to the non-human universe on both the micro and macro scale. While my math was questionable, my grasp on the foundational concepts was pretty solid. I was fascinated and absorbed in imagining how vast the known universe is and how crazy existence felt in relation to it all. I still feel that way. This video elucidates how my teenage musing on space-time felt, feelings I still carry with me (it also helps explain why, for example, I thought things like “pledging allegiance to the flag” —any flag for that matter— in school was ridiculous, pointless, and laughable).
Give it a watch and feel that wonderful disorientation in the cosmic scale of what is and your place in it.
The Good Place really said “People improve when they get external love and support. How can we hold it against them, when they don’t?” and “We choose to be good because of our bonds with other people” and “What matters isn’t if people are good or bad. What matters is if they’re trying to be better today than they were yesterday” and “If soulmates do exist, they aren’t found, they’re made” and “That knowledge [that life ends] is what gives life meaning” and “The answer is friends” and “That’s what the Good Place really is — it’s not even a place, really. It’s just having enough time with the people you love” and I think that’s very sexy of them
I’ve had this book on my TBR for a while now and here are the quotes that really stood out to me in this book:
And though she’d studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.
‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,’ Thoreau had said. ‘Live the life you imagined’.
‘Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’
It was hard to remember what he had sounded like before. What he had been like, precisely. But that was the nature of memory… Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.
This was the life she had been mourning for. This was the life she had beaten herself up for not living. This was the timeline she thought she had regretted not existing in.
The only way to learn is to live.
‘If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace your you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise..’
For Sylvia Plath, existence was a fig tree and each possible life she could live- the happily-married one, the successful poet one - was this sweet juicy fig, but she couldn’t get to taste the sweet juicy figs, so they just rotted right in front of her. It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don’t live.
Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.
The life of a human, according to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, was of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.
‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.’
I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.
All good things are wild and free.
You can have everything and feel nothing.
‘I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths,’ she said, realising something for the first time. ‘But maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths… Who knows? Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.’
‘…It seems impossible to live without hurting people.’ ‘Thats because it is.’
‘I am saying that the thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory. You have to keep going.’
It was as though she had reached some state of acceptance about life - that if there was a bad experience, there would only be bad experiences. She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.
‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’
A fear of what she was feeling. Love. You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.
What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind.
