If you’re drinking water, it feels like a liquid. Alternately, if you managed to escape through an emergency exit the cabin of a doomed ocean-crossing airplane but forgot to locate an unsupplied parachute, the calm waves feel more like cement when you land. Let’s take it to eleven: a sea otter floating on his back…
One of the most lasting ways to rekindle enthusiasm for your work is to look round and take notice of all the jobs you would hate to have. How empowering to shift the tiresome paradigm of waking up dreading another day’s contribution to livelihood into the consideration of one’s work as collateral. Watch someone working…
I’ll always be apprehensive about the nature of reality and the universe in general, but within this life my greatest fear is that I’m becoming a cold person due to lack of meaningful human contact. My meager warmth is sustained from one day to the next, as Oliver with his ration of porridge, by the…
I can’t keep a secret from everyone. It eats me from the inside. If I couldn’t tell a person, I think I’d share it with another animal, or at least a tree. It can be very therapeutic to hear yourself say things out loud, I don’t know why. I think it’s even better to speak…
Game developers need to stop striving to emulate reality. Eventually, virtual worlds are going to be so convincing that people will claim they were playing a video game when they committed a crime. “Um…your honor, when I took out the high school principal with a headshot, that was actually part of a covert operation that…
Things don’t have to make sense. And it’s okay.
One of the things I find remarkable is that after you’ve been sick and are healthy again, you feel exactly the way you did before getting sick. All the cellular changes that occur to make you feel congested and nauseous resolve to their normal state as if nothing happened. How do our cells remember what…
Sometimes I like to imagine possible future situations and decide how I would react to them. For example: 1. a doctor tells me I have cancer 2. an emergency news broadcast reports that the pandemic, 7 years behind schedule but none the weaker, has finally arrived. But not necessarily unfortunate, so these as well: 1….
I know it can be difficult, but try to visualize a person’s face that doesn’t belong to anyone you know or have seen. And make the features reasonable, the nose not too long for example, so that such a face is feasible. Given that the world’s population is estimated to be just over 6.4 billion…
When I’m walking with traffic on the sidewalk, I don’t like to see vehicles pass me and slow down soon afterward, and turn off the road onto a side street. I’m afraid they’re waiting for me to reach the turn off on foot. Then they’ll attack. I don’t like to see objects in discomfort. Here…