A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (The Carls, #2)

by Hank Green

far as I can tell there are only three kinds of lies: the kind you don’t want to get caught telling, the kind you don’t care if you get caught telling, and the kind you can’t get caught telling.

It was like putting a bottle cap in the ground and pulling out a Coke.

It wasn’t big—it looked like it was between one and two hundred pages. And unlike every book ever, it began on the first page, which was disconcerting, in a way. I don’t read a ton, but I know that you usually have to flip through publisher information and title pages and “This one’s for my patient and loving wife, Katherine” before you hit the actual book.

I thought about how maybe the constancy of our surroundings makes us believe in a constancy of reality and of self.

“That’s what I’m afraid of, that we will become like that. I’m worried that we will outsource our satisfaction, and that our lives will get sucked into the nothingness of video games and television and shockingly realistic virtual pornography. We will just get satisfied, and never drive ourselves forward.

The combination of celebrity scientist and celebrity pundit is certainly unusual, but it might be, like a reality TV president, the sort of thing that isn’t as surprising as it seems at first glance.

A lot of the reason we look to friends is because they’re a source of meaning. If you’re getting meaning in other ways, it’s easy to let your friendships wither. That’s one reason success can be isolating. I learned that from an expert.

everywhere light of the city,

These men—sorry, but it usually is men—don’t care who gets hurt because they’re telling themselves a story in which they’re the hero.

Because when we feel like none of the rooms we are in matter, that’s when we’re really lost.

April dying was the best thing that could have happened to my career.

At the same time, there was plenty to be angry about. The Carls hadn’t ended the housing crisis, or student loans, or medical debt. America still had mass shootings. In fact, with people losing a clear path and the economy losing steam, all of these things seemed worse than ever.

Look, I got off on the money. I know it’s gross, but April taught me to be honest.

“I guess we’re at the point in history where being a person has become a liability. Better to just be a disembodied jumble of ideas.”

What I wanted was the part where people were asked to get together once a week to talk about how to be a good person and, like, hang out with their neighbors. It’s pretty amazing that apparently the only way to get people to do that is to invent an all-seeing, kindhearted sky dad who will be super disappointed/burn you for eternity if you don’t show up.

if there is anything you can do to set us on a path to be more able to withstand another cosmic kick in the nuts, please do it.

We gave everyone in America that power when we decided that basically anyone can buy an assault rifle. I don’t pretend to understand the motivations of these shooters, but ultimately it has to be at least a little bit about power, right? They’ve been convinced that having power is how you measure your worth, and they are sad or angry or, as is so often the case, both, and they see that there’s one way they can definitely change the world. They’ve seen a dozen other guys do the same thing, so why not them?

We can blame those people, but the only thing a mass murder “means” is that we’ve made it too easy to kill. None of us are going to talk about it anymore in this book, because if we did, that man will get to keep having his power on us, and I’m sick of it. Moving on.

I think I’m good at looking like I have things together on the outside, but that’s only because I spend an immense amount of time worrying about it.

“I mean, you two sound really smart, but really you just watch The Thread,” Bex said after we’d gone on for five or six minutes.

“But we’re not doing a remarkable thing, we’re trying to slow them down from doing something remarkable too fast.”

Did he get in his van and ignore maybe the weirdest thing that had happened to him in his whole life (the Black girl he had messed with at Cowtown for overfondling his weird rocks snuck around the back of a sleazy hotel in a Nissan Frontier to witness him dumpster diving, only to then drive into a pole)? Or did he walk over to ask if I was OK and also what on earth I was doing there?

I feel like I have to tell you right now that this volcano does not erupt in this book. Like, it seems like foreshadowing, but it’s not.

This, if anything, made me more uncomfortable. People who “don’t consider race or gender” sure seem to end up hiring almost all white guys, almost as if they’re absolutely considering race and gender.

A final slam and the door swung open, taking part of the frame with it. The light now poured out of the doorway along with the final words of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” In that door stood a small person, just over five feet tall and so full of “fuck the world” energy that there was absolutely no one else it could possibly have been.

Looking back at my memories from that time, they are all of cellular respiration and phospholipids and protein folding and RNA. This was the playground of my childhood. It was a joyful place not in spite of but because of its simplicity.

You know where you came from, but you don’t know why you exist. I’ve got that flipped: I have no idea who built me or sent me here, but I do know exactly what I’m for.

In other words, someone somewhere was pretty sure you were going to destroy yourself, and they felt like you were worth saving, so they sent me. I’ve always known that failure was possible, but I had no idea what would happen if I failed.

Humans do think ahead more than any other animal, but that isn’t saying much. The oceans are filled with plastic, and the atmosphere is filled with carbon dioxide. We’ve built enough bombs to destroy everything ten times over, but apparently solar panels were just one expense too many!

“Why do I know so much about Nancy Reagan, Carl?”

“You two are going to continue your orientation. Miranda here, or should I say Diggles”—he smiled—“is going to come with me.”

I hate the screen names thing now

“Maybe I do hate you,” I said with real malice in my voice, “but I’d rather work on something great with someone I hate than

I didn’t know why I had to follow these rules then. I know now that it was to prevent me from becoming a god.

I had an 8K VR rig, which I used mostly for porn.

Excuse me

“I’ll hold the door open, go get your things from the truck. There is a staircase just inside, go down these stairs. There is a boiler room below. I have collected a number of useful items down there. I’ll bring April down.”

wtf

Focusing on efficiency for the sake of fewer and fewer powerful people would make us more vulnerable to shocks from catastrophes both expected and unexpected. Power grid failures or pandemics or cyberattacks all layered on top of the rapidly escalating pace of power concentration would, in the next couple hundred years, cause some kind of permanent breakdown.

That unknown is a diamond in a universe of dirt. Uncertainty. Unpredictability. It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi’s poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, ‘Pivot.’ Every creation great and small, they are our diamonds. And what you may be in two hundred years, we can guess with fair accuracy.

I was pissed off enough about what Facebook did with my personal data; I wasn’t going to give a bunch of start-up bros access to my literal mind.

I was not in the right frame of mind to slowly vent fifteen condoms of hydrogen out my window that night, but that’s what I did.

Let me say it for anyone who needs to hear it: There are too many guns in this fucking country.

We’ve got two competing ideas inside of our heads: first, that all people have the same value because otherwise we’re immoral monsters, and then second, that some people are more valuable because they have access to more money or skills or knowledge. I’m not saying this is good; I’m just saying it’s a thing.

I disagreed with his version of the story a bit, it hadn’t just been people who weren’t happy about the Dream who had figured this out, but I didn’t need to get into it with him, so I just said, “Yeah. People have known about that for a long time.”

pandemic.

This is at least the third time pandemic has been used and i don't like it

And then there was a monkey, and then my vision blurred and I heard a rushing noise in my ears. I put my head down just in time to pass out.

yeah when you put it like that....

I know I’m not the first one to mention this, but I feel like I need to reemphasize that it is really weird to talk to a monkey and really weird to talk to a space alien computer program, but it’s, like, unsustainably weird to talk to both at the same time. But then, like everything, somehow you just get used to it.

“All of this will make you less able to handle unlikely but ultimately inevitable catastrophes. Especially if they compound. A war on top of an unstable climate on top of a pandemic, for example.”

“So we have a hundred fifty million dollars, a sentient monkey who is also a superintelligent alien AI, access to a massively influential anonymous video-essay platform, a mole in Val Verde, a high-level Altus user ready to turn his coat when needed, and a woman with superstrength who is capable of Googling things with her mind—that’s me.”

One day, an internet company wants to sell books, and then ten years later they’re a threat to nearly every industry on earth.

you allow other entities to take away your freedoms all the time. It’s an intrinsic part of your system. It couldn’t function without that. You grant companies access to your attention so that they can alter your choices in exchange for entertainment. You identify with groups and grant them the ability to choose for you which problems you will be most concerned about. You listen to a friend when they care about something, and then you care about it too. One of the most powerful traits of your system is how ardently you believe in your individuality while simultaneously operating almost entirely as a collective.”

Most people who have power, they don’t have it for reasons, they just have it.”