Upgrade

by Blake Crouch

And I was struck again with the awareness that I was alive in strange times. There was a palpable sense of things in decline.

It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize.

“Life never really goes the way you want or expect. Usually, even getting exactly what you want turns out not to have been what you really wanted. So, my son, if you ever find a sliver of happiness and peace, just be thankful and live. Don’t reach for more, because a sliver is more than most people ever find.”

Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.

If nothing changes, we will die off for the stupidest reason imaginable—because we refused, for so many childish reasons, to do the obvious things that would save us.”

“Right and wrong are constructs born of human sentiment. Nothing but stories we’ve made up and

Finally understood that free will did not exist, because I could not choose my desires, only whether to pursue them.

We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.

What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there’s no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.