I feel terrible when stuff I buy says it was made with love. Do I deserve the love of someone who never even met me? Do I deserve love at all? That’s why I prefer eating food made by unfeeling machines.
I read Montaigne’s essays (written in the 1500’s) and while his views are remarkably modern in many ways, one thing that stuck out to me was how unabashedly elitist he is. The translation I had used the phrase “common herd” to refer to the large majority of people who failed to impress him due to their lack of education or strength of character. I hesitate to speak for him since I think he was a wiser man than I am, but I expect that our modern notions about democracy would have seemed ridiculous to him. He might accept that universal suffrage is in practice the least-bad option currently available to us, but he would argue that at least in principle it would be better to exclude people who don’t actually know how to run a country from the process of deciding how the country is to be run.
(He would also be unashamed to say that the life of an exceptional person is worth more than the life of someone ordinary, but we think that in the modern day too. We just consider it rude to be so explicit about it.)
Fun fact: humans aren’t responsible for the first mass extinction caused by organisms polluting the atmosphere with poisonous gas. Blue-green algae did it first, with “a decrease in the size of the biosphere of >80%”.
Isn’t that how most people socialize at parties? Some people can do it naturally, but I figure most people are pretending. I frequently ask myself “What would a normal human do in this situation?”
I was surprised by how nervous some of the people who visited me from the city were when I lived in a slightly rural area. It wasn’t even that remote - I had a neighbor across the street! Telling people that there were no bears and a lot less crime didn’t convince them to relax.
A moonless night away from any artificial light is dark. Can’t-see-your-own-feet dark, and also so quiet that you start hearing a lot of noises that you aren’t used to hearing. It’s really unsettling. But of course I just carried a flashlight.
The PETM wasn’t so bad, and neither was the Cretaceous hothouse Earth. Paleontology gives me the perspective needed to know that we’re not all going to die even in the worst-case scenario.
Almost ten years ago, I was walking and as a car drove by, a woman inside it yelled something at me. I couldn’t hear what she said but I assumed she was catcalling me. That memory warms me to this day.
Yeah, I feel like Avengers: Endgame was an ending for the MCU. I’m not complaining, because a good story needs to have an ending, but I’m also not motivated to see superhero movies coming out after Endgame (at least not cosmic-scale superhero movies - I’ll always have a soft spot for Peter Parker).