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‘Newlyweds are refugees fleeing single life,’ she said. ‘Most people totally misrepresent themselves and enter into legally binding, lifelong marital agreements dragging a trail of half-truths. They’ll do anything to grow old with someone overnight.’
why does everyone on the planet earth have to be beautiful? What kind of value system is that?
‘I lived in the past. I feared the future. I wasted the present.’
‘Love is a miracle only if you don’t understand what the word miracle means.’
The enemy of love is impatience and eye rolling. Even gentle mockery is corrosive. Learn how to defuse the other’s ticking bomb. Notice what the beginning of a negative spiral looks like. Prioritise snoring remedies. Don’t exaggerate hurt feelings. Have more morning sex than night sex. Identify which of your partner’s faults are unfixable and devise a workaround. In marriage it is survival of the deafest, okay?’ She was shouting right in their faces. ‘No bathroom lightbulbs over forty watts! Deciding what to eat will constitute three-quarters of your marriage so, when it comes to menus, always
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also believed that life was meaningless but not worthless, and how that distinction had been enough to get me out of bed in the morning.
Social media only seemed good to me if you no longer thought earth time was precious. And not one single argument in favour of it—keeping in touch with friends, being socially aware, staying politically engaged—addressed why you should check it thirty-seven times a day or why your online persona needed to be hyperbolic or cheery to the point of sinister.
I hoped nationalism was dead. Of all the arbitrary distinctions made between people, the longitudinal and latitudinal happenstance of birth always seemed to rank among the most meaningless.
She wondered when one human being had last given another human being the benefit of the doubt—2005? And why were all the most selfish people on earth pretending to have empathy burnout? And why were so many people boasting that vulnerability was their only accreditation? And why were people still engaging in the taxing promotional duties of selling themselves as happy? The whole discourse now seemed like someone’s overreaction to someone else’s overreaction to a hysterical response to an innocuous comment. She thought: surely the wisdom of crowds would not be a phrase if someone tried to coin
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‘Self-actualising on social media is the new flossing in public.’
‘Why do we give credence to “lived experience”? All the time people misperceive intentions, misread facial expressions, misunderstand tone; they project, transfer, carry a history of past troubled confrontations with them into benign interactions, and then you have to factor in confirmation bias, negativity bias, inter-group bias, the availability heuristic, the fundamental attribution error, the bandwagon effect, the clustering illusion, the empathy gap, salience, herding, selective attention. How can anyone know enough about every individual’s psychological state to confirm how much of their
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‘We declared moral bankruptcy but kept on spending! Our sensual pleasures were expensive. We dehumanised some, over-humanised others, and barely managed to hide our jealousy of actual zombies with their outdoor living and their simple diets.’
humans were the same as always: violent, loving, curious, self-interested, and made almost entirely of hope and denial.
my heart cracking down the middle.
I don't buy it.
