Maybe I’m Full of Shit, But…
Thoughts on everything and nothing
You now find yourself faced with a choice: realizing that you’ve fallen for a click-bait headline (sucker!) you could exit immediately and cut your losses. Or you could remain to read my nonsensical — and more than a little vain — thoughts composed while either in the shower and/or slightly (very?) inebriated, and thereby lose most of your dignity and indeed even your soul. Most likely, as you surely realize, this depravity derives from my entirely irresponsible and grotesque deployment of hyphens — !
Since by now your potential escape has utterly failed I do hereby declare my hyphens victorious and your decision irrevocable — you must abandon all hope and finish out this article.
With those formalities behind us, what I now humbly lay before you is a compilation of disjointed aphorisms — distilled thoughts and observations which speak to general principles. Most are original, to the extent anything can be, while others have been scraped from the greatest minds of the past few thousand years. Before you ask, yes, I dubbed them thus and, no, the Chainsmokers are most definitely not featured.
Please note that the only common thread to my musings is that they are all bullshit, wrong, or contain their own refutations. Therefore at this point I must invoke, with respect to the forthcoming, the disclaimer of the great philosopher Michel de Montaigne:
“I myself am the subject: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain. Therefore, farewell.”
And so part of me hopes you enjoy what comes next, but a more honorable part of me hopes you disagree with every word. Therefore, either way, farewell!
Life is not something to be taken seriously
I love smart phones — never before has society provided a way for people to self identify as uninterested, and uninteresting, in social situations
People who check their phones constantly do so because their thoughts are too repetitive
It is impossible not to become who you think other people think you are
Half measures spoil every whole
In the same way that possessions end up possessing us, the artist is always created by his creations
All things that are common have little value, hence only the great can have great faults
Those who pay too much attention to the little things become incapable of accomplishing great ones
Nothing is as big of a deal as you think it is when you’re thinking about it, which is why we suffer more in our imaginations than in reality
It often means much more if something is conspicuously absent than if it is conspicuously present
The inherent value of something is generally inversely proportional to the importance of its marketing; therefore an emphasis on appearances at work signals a lack of real contribution
Love is the triumph of the unconditional over the conditional
We consider love to be beautiful because it requires power to overcome the conditional, and beauty is the descent of power into the visible
A truth kept silent becomes poisonous
In order to understand, one must turn away — so too does the obstacle in the path tend to become the path
All perception is reality and vice versa
It is often the absurd that dictates our perceptions and therefore our reality
We love ourselves more than we love most other people but we care more about what other people think than what we ourselves think
It is a lie that discovery creates ownership — rather, every person who encounters a general truth partakes equally
If everything is sacred then nothing is and if nothing is sacred then everything is
Opposing ideas often contain the most beauty, just as opposing forces allow the taut strings of a guitar to create music
I respect tattoos a great deal, they take the idea of ‘skin in the game’ to an aesthetic (and literal) place
The absolute always belongs to pathology, which is a pathological idea unto itself
There is little true discovery — it is mostly corrected ignorance and permutation
We spend our lives trying to figure out how to spend our lives
The interstices of time are where life occurs most frequently, and is most frequently lost
Anything you do reveals you
Intervention is generally unwise as it presupposes complete knowledge
Those who highlight their flaws are either vain or magnificent, but never both
With the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal for they have no concept of death
The property of subtle inconsistency is the essence of attraction while those who are overly consistent with any narrative are repulsive
Reading and writing are for the mind what eating and shitting are for the body
Social media is the least social thing of all
The clock sacrificed the human element upon the altar of efficiency, just as the search engine is in the process of sacrificing the human mind
As we go through life we are drivers in the fog with a distorted rear view mirror
It requires more virtue to partake in moderation than to abstain
You forfeit your freedom anytime you seek a part of yourself outside of yourself
Living “for” the moment is not the same thing as living “in” the moment
Beware those who use many words to say nothing
You do not typically desire what you already possess, but you most likely would if you didn’t possess it
More often than not, those who use profanity are the least profane
Internal problems cannot be solved with external solutions but the inverse is not true
