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We lived in a veritable surveillance state, engaged with screens more than with our loved ones, and the algorithms knew us better than we knew ourselves.
It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize.
No one teaches you how to handle the death of a dream. But
What allows human beings to concentrate on things amid the maelstrom of infinite stimuli is a neurological process called sensory gating. It filters out low-relevance (redundant or unnecessary) stimuli in the brain from all possible environmental stimuli. If this didn’t happen, we would experience an overload of irrelevant information in the higher cortical centers.
The absence of sensory gating is a key marker for schizophrenia, and actually contributes to making people go insane. An existence without gating would be torture.
“It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.”
“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.
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.
