Jonah Lehrer:

The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all.

His pain may actually have accelerated the pace of his research, allowing him to withdraw from the world and concentrate entirely on his work.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Charles Darwin:

Work is the only thing which makes life endurable to me.

Richard Sennett:

It's certainly possible to get by in life without dedication. The craftsman represents the special human condition of being engaged.

Curtis White:

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs.

Rattle:

Paranoia about the conspiracy is always justified. It's just usually misplaced.

Louis Menand:

The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it's all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains -- that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one.

Ashby Jones:

Happiness exists just around the corner, it's just a matter of figuring out how to get there.

David Foster Wallace:

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

Winifred Gallagher:

You can't be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That's about as good as it gets.

Alexandar Hemon:

In my twenties, I was prone to anxiety and depression, which I experienced as a depletion of my interiority, a vacuum of thought and language. I went to the mountain to replenish my mind, to reboot its language apparatus. My reclusion worried my parents, and my friends thought I was crazy. But I loved the silence cushioning me while I read. At night, the only sounds came from the bells of roaming cattle and the branches scratching the roof. Excited birds would bid me a good early morning, and I would start reading as soon as I opened my eyes. The controllable austerity healed whatever hurt I had carried up the mountain.

Lehrer:

Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer -- we suffer terribly -- but we don't suffer in vain.

On John McCain:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both "an idea and a cause".

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

Nancy Andreasen:

If you're at the cutting edge, then you're going to bleed.

An exchange:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, "We're not playing."

Depression's Upside

Temple Grandin:

You know what working at the slaughterhouses does to you? It makes you look at your own mortality.

When I was younger I was looking for this magic meaning of life. It's very simple now. Making the lives of others better, doing something of lasting value, that's the meaning of life, it's that simple.

An exchange:

Troy: Don't kid yourself Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone you care about!

Jimmy: Wow, Mr. McClure. I was a grade A moron to ever question eating meat.

Troy: Yes you were Jimmy, yes you were.

Lydia Davis:

I look across the road here at how still the cows stand, a lot of the time.

Phil Agre:

Increasingly freed from geographic constraints and equipped with powerful search tools, we will be able to pick out exactly the people we want to associate with, and we will be able to associate with them whenever we want.

The problem with feudalism, of course, is that most of the relationships aren't good ones, so that everyone is trapped in the relational world they were born with.

Virginie Tisseau:

I ride the tram because every day it takes me to a place less familiar.

Lydia Davis:

When you slide by it all, so fast, you think you won't ever have to get bogged down in it again -- the traffic, the neighborhoods, the stores, waiting in lines. We're really speeding now. The ride is smooth. Pretty quiet. Just a little squeaking from some metal part in the car that's jiggling. We're all jiggling a little.

Ellis:

All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

Rivka Galchen:

Even though I very much like people in general, I find most people, in specific, kind of difficult. I prefer the taciturn company of my things. I love my things. I have a great capacity for love, I think.

An exchange:

Dante: You hate people.
Randal: But I love gatherings. Isn't it ironic?

An exchange with Michael Haneke:

Q: Why are your films always so disturbing?

A: Audiences are having mainstream cinema and television touch on only the surface of things, and they get irritated when confronted by a more exacting gaze into the depths of our existence.

David Foster Wallace:

Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Rivka Galchen:

Every Tuesday night I go and see whatever is playing at the movie theater nearby. I'm not choosy. I'm happy to see whatever everyone else is going to see. That way I stay vaguely in touch without having to talk to people, which is great, because even though I very much like people in general, I find most people, in specific, kind of difficult. I prefer the taciturn company of my things. I love my things. I have a great capacity for love, I think.

Tim Kreider's married friend:

It's not as if being married means you're any less alone.

Bumblebee Labs:

People with a passion for everything are not interested in things themselves, they're interested in interest. To them, the actual objects of study are incidental; what fascinates them are the more abstract layers in which everything is interconnected.

When a person who is passionate about one thing meets a person who is passionate about everything, they just assume that this person is passionate about many "one things". What they fail to realize is that the passion is not thing-centric.

Notorious BIG:

The key to staying on top of things is to treat everything like it's your first project. Like it's your first day like back when you was an intern. Like that's how you try to treat things like, just stay hungry.

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Staff Sgt. David Bellavia:

While on our second patrol in Iraq, a civilian candy truck tried to merge with a column of our armored vehicles, only to get run over and squashed. The occupants were smashed beyond recognition. Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars. The entire platoon hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours. We stopped, and as we stood guard around the wreckage, we grew increasingly hungry. Finally, I stole a few nibbles from one of the cleaner candy bars. Others wiped away the gore and fuel from the wrappers and joined me.

Joel Stein:

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta.

Lady Bird Johnson:

Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights -- that immaculate woman exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.

Andy Carvin, last Thanksgiving:

Several weeks ago, the family of information studies professor Phil Agre reported him missing, saying that they had not heard from him in over a year.

Charlotte P. Lee, reflecting at the time:

All of us had lost touch with him over the years. How would you know if one of your friends not only lost touch with you, but had also lost touch with almost everyone they know? You wouldn't.

Yesterday, Andy Carvin:

Well, apparently the search is over. The UCLA police department has updated their missing persons bulletin for Agre with the following news: "Philip Agre was located by LA County Sheriff's Department on January 16, 2010 and is in good health and is self sufficient."

See also, at the end of the article:

Those of us guiding the search for Phil have more detailed information about the interaction between the officer and Phil that is not being made public. The information we did receive gave us no evidence that he is actually "safe". Therefore we are continuing to search for him.

Phil Agre, from 2001:

Increasingly freed from geographic constraints and equipped with powerful search tools, we will be able to pick out exactly the people we want to associate with, and we will be able to associate with them whenever we want.

The problem with feudalism, of course, is that most of the relationships aren't good ones, so that everyone is trapped in the relational world they were born with.

Missing Internet Pioneer Phil Agre Is Found Alive

Tony Judt:

During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs ...

But then comes the night.

I am occasionally astonished, when I reflect upon the matter, at how readily I seem to get through, night after night, week after week, month after month, what was once an almost insufferable nocturnal ordeal. I wake up in exactly the position, frame of mind, and state of suspended despair with which I went to bed -- which in the circumstances might be thought a considerable achievement.

Hal Finney:

Although ALS is generally described as a fatal disease, this is not quite true. It is only mostly fatal.

I hope that when the time comes, I will choose life.

Carmine Gallo:

Google gatherings often feature a giant timer on the wall, counting down the minutes left for a particular meeting or topic. It's literally a downloadable timer that runs off a computer and is projected 4 feet tall.

The timer exerts a subtle pressure to keep meetings running on schedule.

John Tierney:

When people were asked to anticipate how much extra money and time they would have in the future, they realistically assumed that money would be tight, but they expected free time to magically materialize.

Sterling Hayden:

What does a man need -- really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in -- and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all -- in the material sense.

Cormac McCarthy:

I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about?

Have you seen "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"?

Night

Tim Kreider:

The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers' differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It's exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We're all anxiously sizing up how everyone else's decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated -- that we are, in some sense, winning.

Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others' as selfish or pathological or wrong.

Tim's married friend:

It's not as if being married means you're any less alone.

An introvert:

One of the greatest compliments I have ever given anyone I dated is that being with him was like being alone.

Decius:

Wow, life is boring.

Nora Johnson:

In our unending search for panaceas, we believe that happiness and "success" -- which, loosely translated, means money -- are the things to strive for. People are constantly surprised that, even though they have acquired material things, discontent still gnaws.

Carolyn Johnson:

Paradoxically, as cures for boredom have proliferated, people do not seem to feel less bored; they simply flee it with more energy.

Pico Iyer:

It seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn't pursued.

I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media -- and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can't think of a single thing I lack.

Mason, Waters, Wright, and Gilmour:

And you run and run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Lisa Moore:

It has always been this way. Finite. But at forty-five you realize it.

Vijay Seshadri:

Yes, only in the forest do you feel at peace,
up in the branches and down in the terrific gorges,
but you've seen through everything else.
You've fled in terror across the frozen lake,
you've found yourself in the sand, the palace,
the prison, the dockside stews;
and long ago, on this same planet, you came home
to an empty house, poured a Scotch-and-soda,
and sat in a recliner in the unlit rumpus room,
puzzled at what became of you.

The Referendum

The Invisible Committee:

Thirty years of "crisis," mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy. ... We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It's not that there's not enough work, it's that there is too much of it.

They say the family is coming back, the couple is coming back. But the family that's coming back is not the same one that went away. Its return is nothing but a deepening of the prevailing separation that it serves to mask, becoming what it is through this masquerade. Everyone can testify to the doses of sadness condensed from year to year in family gatherings: the forced smiles, the awkwardness of seeing everyone pretending in vain, the feeling that a corpse is lying there on the table, and everyone acting as though it were nothing. From flirtation to divorce, from cohabitation to stepfamilies, everyone feels the inanity of the sad family nucleus, but most seem to believe that it would be sadder still to give it up. The family is no longer so much the suffocation of maternal control or the patriarchy of beatings as it is this infantile abandon to a fuzzy dependency, where everything is familiar, this carefree moment in the face of a world that nobody can deny is breaking down, a world where "becoming self-sufficient" is a euphemism for "finding a boss." They want to use the "familiarity" of the biological family as an excuse to undermine anything that burns passionately within us and, under the pretext that they raised us, make us renounce the possibility of growing up, as well as everything that is serious in childhood. We need to guard against such corrosion.

The couple is like the final echelon in the great social debacle.

Paul Graham:

It's not so much that there's something special about founders as that there's something missing in the lives of employees.

Matthew Crawford:

One of the hottest things at the shopping mall right now is a store called Build-a-Bear, where children are said to make their own teddy bears. I went into one of these stores, and it turns out that what the kid actually does is select the features and clothes for the bear on a computer screen, then the bear is made for him. Some entity has leaped in ahead of us and taken care of things already, with a kind of solicitude. The effect is to preempt cultivation of embodied agency, the sort that is natural to us.

Curtis White:

When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

The Coming Insurrection

John T. Cacioppo:

Social isolation can be as harmful to your health as smoking or a sedentary lifestyle. A large part of this effect is driven by the subjective sense of social isolation we call loneliness. New research shows that human beings are simply far more intertwined and interdependent--physiologically as well as psychologically--than our cultural prejudices have allowed us to acknowledge. "If you want to go fast," says an African proverb, "go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

Elizabeth Kirkwood:

It would be a shame if Capoccio's findings, insightful as they are, made people feel overtly afraid of feeling lonely. There is much to be said for the dialogues we have with ourselves. Isn't that so?

A female introvert:

One of the greatest compliments I have ever given anyone I dated is that being with him was like being alone.

Michael Chabon:

Once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

Noteworthy, in early 2006:

Social networking is the 21st century equivalent of collecting baseball cards.

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection

Clive Thompson:

People weren't just getting fatter randomly.

Good behaviors -- like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy -- pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses.

And the same is true of bad behaviors -- clusters of friends appear to "infect" each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking.

People may be able to pass along a social signal without themselves acting on it.

Nicholas A. Christakis & James Fowler:

Your colleague's husband's sister can make you fat, even if you don't know her.

Christakis:

It turns out that all kinds of things, many of them quite unexpected, can flow through social networks.

Christakis & Fowler:

Each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%.

Sandy Pentland:

You couldn't prove what they say, but I happen to believe it.

Subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them.

Nora Johnson:

In our unending search for panaceas, we believe that happiness and "success" -- which, loosely translated, means money -- are the things to strive for. People are constantly surprised that, even though they have acquired material things, discontent still gnaws.

Pico Iyer:

It seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn't pursued.

Thompson:

Your place in the network affects your happiness, but your happiness doesn't affect your place in the network.

Is Happiness Catching?

There's something very scary about having millions of people waiting to see what you're going to do next.

"I wake up in the middle of the night thinking, 'How did it ever get to this point?'"

It is easy to give in to despair.

You don't follow your bliss. You learn not to follow your bliss, to let your bliss follow you.

The truth is we're lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren't working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it's time to try something new.

If you really care about somebody, you give them constructive feedback. And if you don't care about somebody, you only say positive things.

If you are not found, the rest cannot follow.