I think, today's irony ends up saying: 'How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.' Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig.
David Foster Wallace
“Estonians have decided to translate AI as 'kratt', after a mythological creature.
A kratt is a creature crafted by humans, brought to life with just a little help from the devil, and it can fulfil any task you give it. Now, if you're real smart - a kratt will make you rich and successful. It will do your work, and create for you the life you always dreamed of. But if you give it the wrong task - you're definitely fucked.”
I frequently hear the same yearning expressed in my consulting room – the wish for the world to disappear, for a cessation of any feelings, whether positive or negative, that intrude on the patient’s peace, alongside the painful awareness that the world’s demands are waiting on the way out. You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless. Life becomes something that won’t stop bothering you. Among its most frequent and oppressive symptoms is chronic indecision, as though all the possibilities and choices life confronts you with cancel each other out, leaving only an irritable stasis.
Josh Cohen
I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that - I don’t mind people being happy - but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying “write down 3 things that made you happy today before you go to sleep”, and “cheer up” and “happiness is our birthright” and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position - it’s rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say “Quick! Move on! Cheer up!” I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness”. Ask yourself “is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.
Hugh Mackay (via varanine)
friendship with russians is when they conquer your land through a genocide and then say: “we can live in peace, but acting like your culture is equal with mine is russophobic. speak russian, please”
That subsidizing capital accumulation has become the only readily available way for most to act on compassion for others is perverse.
Mathew Snow ‘Against Charity’
Joanna Karpowicz „7 AM, Poland”, 42 x 29,7 cm, acrylic on paper, 2024 (from artist's fb page)