14 posts tagged with "humor"
On the difference between the symbol and the thing it stands for — why money is just a unit of measurement, why your identity is a patchwork of stories other people wrote, and why the buck has to stop with you, right now.
A witty defense of purposelessness for the chronically over-optimized — on why you are biologically just a very anxious tube, why music has no finish line, and why the highest form of living might be whacking a tree stump with a stick.
An old idea, told slightly unhinged: you are not a lonely meat-sack stranded in a hostile cosmos — you are the cosmos itself, briefly pretending to be a person who forgot to mute himself on the morning call.
Hand yourself a magic wand and total control over reality, and something strange happens: it gets boring. On why surprise beats certainty, why maxed-out pleasure curdles, and why 'I don't know' might be the most freeing thing you can say.
We keep deferring our lives to a future that never quite arrives — the next promotion, the next blender, the someday we'll finally feel alive. On the hoax of the future, why your to-do-list version of yesterday is a ghost of the real thing, and why the anxious self you're straining to fix was never actually there.
Life only feels complicated because you keep trying to explain it — and the only tool the mind has is a knife. On why the flower isn't complicated (the botany is), why every solved problem just relocates our worry, and why the night sky is less a question to answer than a firework display to enjoy.
The cheerful case against immortality — why a world where nobody dies is an overcrowded, unpruned mess, why death is how the universe keeps its sense of wonder, and why refusing to give your body back to the soil is the one ungrateful move in an otherwise generous life.
Some of the most destructive people in history were dead certain they were helping. On the monkey who 'rescued' the fish by setting it up a tree, why a world made entirely of saints would be a nightmare, and why the highest kind of goodness — like breathing — never once thinks of itself as good.
The harder you grip the date, the presentation, the putt, the more spectacularly you blow it. On the ancient paradox of effortless action — why the river never strains to reach the sea, why the micromanager is the problem, and why doing a thing well so often means quitting trying to.
Your enemies are no longer assassins — they're a frozen Wi-Fi router and a passive-aggressive email, yet you meet them as though they're trying to kill you. On the immovable mind, the difference between reacting and responding, and why an undefeated swordsman once won the most important duel of his life by being maddeningly, serenely late.
There's a parable about a beggar who spent thirty years asking strangers for change while sitting on a box full of gold. On why discomfort is unavoidable but suffering is optional, why you are not the voice in your head, and why one small question — am I being present? — reliably ends the misery.
How do you fall in love with a universe that is, on honest inspection, a bit of a horror show? On the trap of cosmic detachment (lawful, perfect, and faintly sociopathic), the opposite trap of an unguarded heart, and the strange skill of standing in both at once — heartbroken and serene in the very same breath.
Suppose a dial were wired in beside your eyes, and turning it changed what a person actually is — body, then personality, then soul, then a single shared awareness, then nothing at all. On the many channels of identity, why you are not the car you happen to be driving around in, and why being nobody in particular turns out to be an enormous relief.
There's a kind of room inside you that the noise in your head has been renting for free for years. On why the old Eastern traditions care about taste rather than footnotes, why 'heaven' and 'sky' are the same word in so many languages, and how to find the spaciousness your thoughts have been borrowing all along.