Michael > Michael's Quotes

“Second, there is a working class who are becoming more like medieval serfs, with diminishing chances of owning significant assets or improving their lot except with government transfers.”
― Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

“It is unlike the industrial era, when corporations depended on people with a wide range of skills: managers and marketers, engineers and technicians, warehouse workers and salespeople. These jobs were often unionized, at least in the manufacturing and energy sectors, so that upper management was compelled at least to consider diverse views on how the business should operate. In contrast, tech firms are rarely unionized, and none of the largest internet-based firms are.7 Crucially, the tech giants employ relatively few people in proportion to their revenues.”
― Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

“If [more] information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”
― Timothy Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

“But what looked like a more diverse and open media world, where anyone could be a reporter or reach an audience, is turning into one where a very few companies control the information pipelines.”
― Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

“In Wired magazine, Antonio García Martínez describes the contemporary Silicon Valley as “feudalism with better marketing.” He sees a clear elite of venture capitalists and company founders. Below them are the skilled professionals, well paid but living ordinary middle-class lives, given the high prices and heavy taxes. Below them lies the vast population of gig workers, whom García Martínez compares to sharecroppers in the South. At the bottom, there is an untouchable class of homeless, drug addicts, and criminals.36”
― Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

“It’s ironic that while we enjoy easier access to information than ever before, we are falling behind in real knowledge. We are replacing books with blogs, and essays with tweets.”
― Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

“One might think this scenario plays out only in high school or college, but the politics of friendship are tricky at every age.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“Even if you consider yourself a terrible writer, writing can be viewed as a tool. There are huge benefits to writing, even if no one—yourself included—ever reads what you write. In other words, the process matters more than the product.”
― Timothy Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

“busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness: Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. All this noise and rush and stress seem contrived to drown out or cover up some fear at the center of our lives.”
― Timothy Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

“Both men, once as close as men of that sort could be, stare at each other. One of them a man who refuses to forget the past, and one who can’t remember it at all.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“the first people to break the laws of bureaucracy are always the bureaucrats themselves.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“solitary golfers struck him as a squirrelly, self-involved breed, like hermits or fly fishermen.”
― Stewart O'Nan, Henry, Himself

“March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Have they been educated to the level of their intellectual ability or ambition? Is their use of free time engaging, meaningful, and productive? Have they formulated solid and well-articulated plans for the future? Are they (and those they are close to) free of any serious physical health or economic problems? Do they have friends and a social life? A stable and satisfying intimate partnership? Close and functional familial relationships? A career—or, at least, a job—that is financially sufficient, stable and, if possible, a source of satisfaction and opportunity? If the answer to any three or more of these questions is no, I consider that my new client is insufficiently embedded in the interpersonal world and is in danger of spiraling downward psychologically because of that.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“The information in our experience is latent, like gold in ore—the case we made in Rule II. It must be extracted and refined with great effort, and often in collaboration with other people, before it can be employed to improve the present and the future.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“Already in 1877, Robert Louis Stevenson called busyness a “symptom of deficient vitality,” and observed “a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“The average estimate implies that when your income increases by 10 percent, your CO2 emissions increase by 9 percent.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“Mobility into the top echelon of the new world order is reliant on acquisition of knowledge, not birthright, not property held for generations, and not, sadly for many, loyalty to one’s work institution.”
― Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class

“Churchill said that we shape our buildings, and afterward our buildings shape us. We made machines to help us think, and now the machines think for us.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“People shape and stage the experiences of their lives for the camera, go on vacations with one eye glued to the video camera. The desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“These days, the old rules no longer apply, but new ones have yet to be written.”
― Bruce Feiler, The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More