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And yet fame cannot, in truth, accomplish what is being asked of it.
Fame makes people more, not less, vulnerable, because it leaves them open to unlimited judgement.
Everyone is wounded by a cruel assessment of their character or merit.
(though one wouldn’t become famous if one didn’t suffer from a compulsion to listen too much). Every worst fear about themselves (that they are stupid, ugly, not worthy of existence) will daily be actively confirmed by strangers.
They will learn that detestation of their personality is – in some quarters – a badge of honour. Sometimes the attacks will be horribly insightful. At
To sum up, fame really just means that someone gets noticed a great deal, not that they are more intensely understood, appreciated or loved.
Appreciation and understanding are only available through individuals one knows and cares about, not via groups of a thousand or a million strangers.
There is no short cut to friendship – which is what the famous person is in effect seeking.
The desire for fame is a sign that an ordinary life has ceased to be good enough.
The solution is not to encourage ever more people to become famous, but to put greater efforts into encouraging a higher level of politeness and consideration for everyone,
A healthy society will give up on the understandable but erroneous belief that fame might guarantee that truly valuable goal: the kindness of strangers.
The big economic reason why we can’t explore our potential as we might is that it is hugely more productive for us not to do so.
We have become tiny, relatively wealthy cogs in giant, efficient machines. And yet, in our quiet moments, we reverberate with private longings to give our multitudinous selves expression.
In communist society … nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes … thus it is possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner … without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.
In love and work, life requires us to be specialists even though we are by nature equally suited for wide-ranging exploration.
Cynicism permeates the whole system.
Somewhere within his project, he carries a hope: that a corporation like a supermarket could be brought into line with the best values of art and assume psychological and spiritual importance inside the framework of commerce.
The philanthropist has been imagined as a person who makes a lot of money in the brutish world of commerce, with all the normal expectations of maximizing returns, squeezing wages and focusing on obvious opportunities, and then makes a clean break.
In their spare hours, they can devote their wealth to projects that are profoundly non-commercial: the patient collection of Roman coins, Islamic vases or modern sculptures. But philanthropists know that if they ever took an
Capitalism is the most skilled machine we have ever yet constructed for satisfying human needs.
because poverty is intricately bound up with humiliation.
The punishment of poverty is not limited to money, but extends to the suffering that attends a lack of status: a constant low-level sense that who one is and what one does are of no interest to a world that is punitively unequal in its distribution of honour as well as cash. Poverty not only induces financial harm but damages mental health as well.
Netscher isn’t changing how much the low-paid earn; he is changing how the low-paid are judged.
Decisions must not always be probed too hard, or moods unpacked. We should respect and not tinker with emotions, especially as they relate to love and the spiritual varieties of experience. We need to fall silent – more frequently than we do – and simply listen.
It was school that corrupted us and made us lose our way, which is why it is from the mouths of the very young that we hear truths and sensibilities that the most so-called intelligent adults will have forgotten. To the Romantic, it will always be a child who points out that the emperor is wearing no clothes.
Authenticity is the highest form of morality. Politeness is a lid that we place upon our real selves to suppress the truths that could free us.
when we have to pay a lot for something nice, we appreciate it to the full.
Why, then, do we associate a cheap price with lack of value? Our response is a hangover from our long pre-industrial past. For most of human history, there truly was a strong correlation between cost and value: the higher the price, the better things tended to be, because there was simply no way both for prices to be low and for quality to be high. Everything had to be made by hand, by expensively trained artisans, with raw materials that were immensely difficult to transport. The expensive sword, jacket, window or wheelbarrow was simply always the better one. This relationship between price
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High-quality objects would enter the mass market, excellence would be democratized. However, despite the greatness of these efforts, instead of making wonderful experiences universally available, industrialization has inadvertently produced a different result: it has seemed to rob certain experiences of their loveliness, interest and worth.
It’s not – of course – that we refuse to buy inexpensive or cheap things. It’s just that getting excited over cheap things has come to seem a little bizarre. How do we reverse this? The answer lies in a slightly unexpected area: the mind of a four-year-old. Imagine him with a puddle.
We have been looking at prices the wrong way. We have fetishized them as tokens of intrinsic value, we have allowed them to set how much excitement we are allowed to have in given areas, how much joy is to be mined in particular places. But prices were never meant to be like this: we are breathing too much life into them and thereby dulling too many of our responses to the inexpensive world.
The people who have most to teach us here are artists. They are the experts at recording and communicating their enthusiasms, which, like children, can take them in slightly unexpected directions.
Our reluctance to be excited by inexpensive things isn’t a fixed debility of human nature. It’s just a current cultural misfortune.
We need to rethink our relationship to prices. The price of something is principally determined by what it cost to make, not how much human value is potentially to be derived from it.
There are two ways to get richer: one is to make more money and the second is to discover that more of the things we could love are already to hand (thanks to the miracles of the Industrial Revolution). We are, astonishingly, already a good deal richer than we’re encouraged to think we are.
Concepts like kintsugi provide case studies that teach us a useful kind of confidence. Things that might easily be thought unworthy of appreciation can, if described in the right way, emerge as deeply worth valuing.
art is a tool that can help release us from our numbness and provide for catharsis in areas where we have for too long been wrong-headedly brave.
Such pessimism is also a corrective to prevailing sentimentality. It provides an acknowledgement that we are inherently flawed creatures, incapable of lasting happiness, beset by troubling sexual desires, obsessed by status, vulnerable to appalling accidents and always – slowly – dying.
Everything we love and care about will come to ruin; all that we put our hope in will fail.
The human soul, religious people would say, is made by God and so only God can know its deepest secrets. We are never truly alone, because God is always with us. In their way, religions addressed a universal problem: they recognized the powerful need to be intimately known and appreciated and admitted frankly that this need could not realistically ever be met by other people.
The old religious idea was that we are never fully alone; there are always special beings around us upon whose aid we can call.
Given the enormous role of sadness in our lives, it is one of the greatest emotional skills to know how to arrange around us those cultural works that can best help to turn our panic or sense of persecution into consolation and nurture.
High ambitions are noble and important, but there’s also a point when they become the sources of terrible trouble and unnecessary panic.
he knew the toll exacted by perfectionism, and realized that in order to remain more or less sane (which is a very big ambition already) we have to learn not to hate ourselves for failing to be what no ordinary human being ever really is anyway.
A relationship may be good enough even while it has its very dark moments. Perhaps at times there’s little sex and a lot of heavy arguments. Maybe there are big areas of loneliness and non-communication. Yet none of this should lead us to feel freakish or
Similarly, a good-enough job will be very boring at points, it won’t perfectly utilize all our merits or pay a fortune. But we may make some real friends, have times of genuine excitement and finish many days tired but with a sense of true accomplishment.
It takes a great deal of bravery and skill to keep even a very ...
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Gratitude is a mood that grows with age.
Knowing that something difficult is being attempted doesn’t rob the wise of ambition,
The wise rarely expect anything to be wholly easy or to go entirely well.
