More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Belonging, like any other emotion, is an unreachable and fickle state of mind. Mirage and horizon—it’s gone once you’re inside it. Based on a thousand micro-factors that float across one’s field of vision only to disappear as you approach. What changes with the streetlights. Perhaps we’re always stuck in a state of longing. That we are united in this. Our only country, these united states of longing for whatever it is we don’t have.
What follows birth is the ritual of preparing the body for bureaucracy.
The internet is a portal into the suffering of others—sometimes their joy, though mostly, just their suffering. The algorithms are written out to stroke discord, to point the viewer toward where it is they’ll hurt the most. Sharks follow the bleeding. Traffic slows as it passes a brutal accident. Flies swarm meat.
the news story exists in image and in text, and then there is how that story is actually a person’s entire life in sobbing and warped metal. Empathy eats you alive. You can only survive by separating these two, by reading the news and not connecting the whole wet network of human suffering to the breath you are currently taking into your lungs. And if you cannot do this, well, what else is a person to do?
