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We catch each other’s moods.
A stressed boss makes us anxious, a joyful friend makes us glad, and the group carries the load together. When the work or the party ends, the shared feeling has solidified a bond.
To refuse the contagion (reject the stress or joy), to say it doesn’t matter, may be healthy, but it steps outside compassion into loneliness.
Calm is not free: it costs you companionship.
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Being yourself should be effortless: ignore everything, and your authentic self emerges. But no one escapes influence, so the path of "effortless self" is merely reacting: still influenced while pretending it’s natural.
Instead, becoming authentic is a developed trait, a drive or passion that held focus and provided growth in an unlikely direction.
The difference is friction: when you roll downhill, you never choose the path. Authenticity is the trail you break uphill, against fate and influence.
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There are two kinds of attention-seekers.
One was given so much that attention became the baseline; its absence feels like punishment. The other was given too little and learned to perform for scraps.
The first demands what he’s used to; the second chases what he never had.
A psychological idea is that, to be an ordinary person, someone must, at some point, allow you to be extraordinary (loved and successful); yet not so extraordinary that you demand constant affirmation.
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Frankenstein’s creature taught himself virtue. He read Milton and Plutarch, and helped strangers in secret. He knew right from wrong, yet when rejected, he blamed the world’s cruelty for his own.
Loneliness explains his violence but doesn’t excuse it.
Knowing the good and choosing otherwise, then calling it injury, is the difference in a wound and an alibi.
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Perhaps broad-scale contentment is impossible for hormone-filled humans.
Work, striving, and creation are caused by -and cause- anxiety, and anxiety breeds compulsion: the drive is a self-perpetuating spiral without consulting ambition or status.
The coder at 3 AM isn’t only ambitious; he may be restless without a self he can simply inhabit, or he may just be human.
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A purchase is a small high with a long hangover, like drinking or drugs. But perhaps the hangover is the point.
Debt manufactures stress, and stress keeps us driven.
We spend for some momentary joy, but bind our future to pressure: a self-imposed poverty that guarantees we keep striving, a small self-harm to reignite some vitality.
The debt is the purchase.
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Some people must make something to prove they exist.
The compulsion to build, write, or paint an object outside yourself may signal an identity that doesn’t hold on its own.
Contentment makes no demands. The quiet person who simply is has nothing to prove.
Great art may be a monument to what its maker couldn’t take for granted.
(Camille Paglia)
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"Good fences make good neighbors."
A relationship that gives everything and shifts to soothe every whim offers nothing to push against: no boundary, no footing, all padding.
The steadfast fortress, unable to give us all we want, does two things: it gives us something stable to challenge, and it keeps a mystery intact.
Our struggle against it (around it) shapes us, while easy fulfillment produces porosity: a total acceptance with no boundaries.
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We’re told the ideal relationship is frictionless and fully transparent: every desire dissected, every organ visible. But knowing has a price.
Once a desire is named, we feel obliged to accept it as ours. Understanding spreads like a virus, demanding assimilation.
Total openness doesn’t liberate us; it burdens us: it brutally demands that we absorb whatever we’ve been shown.
