As kids we were all bullied about things we had no control over so, generally, we all want to be liked despite who we are. The smartest person in the room isn’t trying to show off how smart they are, they’re trying to be liked despite the fact that they’re smart. The most attractive person in the room isn’t trying to show off how attractive they are, they’re trying to be liked despite the fact that they’re attractive. The richest person in the room isn’t trying to show off how rich they are, they’re trying to be liked despite the fact that they’re rich. So, you know, don’t trust show-offs.…

The story about the Tower of Babel is pretty historically accurate when you realize that before Judeo-Christianity came onto the scene people weren’t that patriotically attached to their own deities. Basically, gods and cultures weren’t connected. “The one you call Pluto, we call Hades. The one you call Krishna, we call Herakles,” the Greeks said under Alexander the Great as he conquered Central Asia, “We’re all speaking the same language at our core.” All of that changed when Exodus 20:5 was written down: “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of…

MAGA is the creed of mostly white men because when anyone yells that they want to, “Make America great again,” what they’re usually yelling is that they want to make themselves great again. This is why mostly white men can also be heard chanting, “Make Britain great again!” or, “Make Australia great again!” It all means the same thing: Make Me Great Again! American (and British, and Australian) men are going to foreign countries to find wives because they want to turn back time and live in a century where White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) are great husbands just for being white and male. In essence, they don’t want to live in the…

Being bad at something you truly love is one of life’s secret blessings. You’re given that much more time to focus on it than those who get it easily. The road is that much longer.

The more chances you give yourself the less respect you’ll have for yourself. You’ll begin to ignore the standards that you’ve set for yourself exactly because you’ll know that you’ll always give yourself another chance. You’ll know that no matter what you won’t walk away. You’ll get comfortable with depending on self-forgiveness. Thus turning self-forgiveness into a crutch comparable to self-avoidance rather than into a motivation for change. Never ever get comfortable with disrespecting yourself.

The difference between the tourist and the traveller is that the traveller allows themselves to be so shaped by where they are at the moment that they can rightfully say, “I’m not just in Toronto, I am Toronto. I’m not just in love, I am love. I’m not just in the abyss, I am the abyss.” Unlike the tourist, the objective of the traveller is to not just be moved but to be remade. And to then shun where and who they are completely so that they can move on to a new way of being, a new city, a new them. Because the traveller knows that you can’t ever…

The art dealer successfully possesses the main character’s body but he quickly dies because a cop pulled him over on his way out of town and he reached for his ID a little too quickly. All of the other party attendees die under somewhat similar circumstances because none of them had been taught as children on how to act in a black body so as to not be shot and killed for something trivial and mundane, like sitting on their own couch. Overcome by this news and the bewildering fact that being black is its own horror movie the Armitage family members–each having already possessed a new body by now–make…

SUPER-EGO: “Let’s wade through the crowd of people who love us because they want to fuck us to find an intimacy that’s far less ephemeral. The last thing our heart wants is a short-lived love affair.” ID: “Hey, at least our heart’s getting something then. All we have and all we’ve ever known are momentary flames. The world’s not as warm as any of us want it to be, there aren’t enough lovers in it to even make a crowd for us to wade through. See, love comes from kindness and kindness requires attention, and that’s the rarest commodity. From us. From anyone. Wading through a crowd of lovers in…

“I’m difficult to understand” is an excuse, and you’re lazy. Communication is difficult, for everyone. For everyone. If you want to be understood then it’s your job to work at being understood, nobody else’s. If you don’t want to be understood and just want to wallow in the loneliness of being incomprehensible that’s fine as well, I mean – that’s a mood, but don’t ever say “I’m difficult to understand” or “I’m complicated.” Say what you really mean to say. Say, “I’m difficult to understand because I don’t actually want to be understood by you, even if I act like I do. I’m too lazy to put in the necessary…

If the modern world disregarded social status and widely embraced a system of kowtowing when apologizing, of publicly kneeling and touching your forehead to the ground in front of the person you’ve wronged, almost all apologies today would be revealed for what they truly are, empty. The modern person kneels for no one, especially when they’re wrong.