What Jealousy Does To You
Your successes don’t count. The only thing you feel is the absent space that separates you from your ambition.
Your successes don’t count. The only thing you feel is the absent space that separates you from your ambition.
It’s supposed to evoke, to stir, to resonate inside us. And if it doesn’t, we’re not at fault: the writing is.
This new generation isn’t against reading: they’re against the forced formality and smugness reflected in our reading society.
You need to face yourself with the mathematical, honest cruelty that the world has imposed. You must take inventory. It’s something most people avoid. That’s because a real reckoning of the self is ugly.
We look at politics as a pop-culture snarkfest. We reward those we hate most with disproportionate attention. Meanwhile, otherwise reasonable candidates are buried by the attention-grabbing schlock of others.
In a society that equates ambition increasingly with money or worldly success, it can be thrilling and gratifying to transfer the very human urge to succeed to a more flexible medium.
The greatest lie, in our maximized world, is that more is more or that better is truly better.
If I hold you to these standards more than I hold them to myself, it’s because it’s easier to love someone else than it is to love yourself.
When you have nothing, no future or prospects or present, you have to find something to anchor you to the world.
This is about how things are better than they seem.