Reconnecting with an old friend, discovering a great poem, a walk in Central Park after a fresh snowfall -- there's nothing so wrong with the world that it can't be repaired, if only for a moment, by staying open to its beauty.
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One of the cooler things about humans is our capacity to be surprised. We build homes in risk-prone areas and are astonished to see them swept away by floods or incinerated by wildfires; we chase the stocks of companies with little hope of ever making a profit and are shocked when their share price crashes to zero; we consume junk food by the fistful and are confounded at the doctor's office to learn we weigh more than we did on our last visit. Sigmund Freud developed an explanation for such behavior, which he called the pleasure principle — the unconscious part of the human psyche that drives us to seek immediate gratification of our desires and needs — and contrasted it with another of his inventions, the reality principle, which takes into account the constraints of the external world and impels us to delay or redirect gratification in order to avoid negative consequences. Freud thought of himself as a scientist and was more interested in explaining than judging. We, on the other hand, live in an age of judgment and find it easy to condemn others, including those determined to rebuild homes and businesses in risk-prone areas. But are we missing something important when we do? Doesn't the reckless disregard of "reality" speak to our innate human optimism, a belief that while, yes, consequences are important, they're not everything, and that sometimes risk-taking is its own reward?
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As I get older and worry less about things I used to worry about, I find I have more time for activities without immediate payoff, like walking. I seem to be in good company. Whitman and Thoreau were walkers, as was Jefferson, who believed that "walking far without fatigue" was the most valuable habit a person could cultivate. Nietzsche, before he lost his mind, was a dedicated walker and gestated some of his best-known works on the mountain trails of Switzerland's Engadine. Literature, too, is filled with people who walk, from Leopold Bloom to Clarissa Dalloway to Frodo and Sam. Tolkien's resolute hobbits leave the Shire on a quest -- the opposite of the kind of walking I do. Like an aging Crusoe marooned in the world's greatest city, I stroll, eyes and ears open, for the pure pleasure of it, delighting in the grand and the plain, the bizarre and mundane, the kaleidoscope of city streetlife at its most dizzying. An idler without destination, stitching my little piece of urban quilt a block at a time.
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There are two kinds of people in the world: those who see it in black and white, and those who don't.
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If your life were a movie you could rewind to any point in the past and re-live differently from that point forward — think, "My Life: The Director's Cut" — what day, month, or year would you choose? How many of us would choose yesterday?
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When, in the not-so-distant future, artificial general intelligence becomes reality, humans are likely to surrender their independence without a fight. Reassured by promises of greater comfort and convenience, most will sign on willingly — rejecting any sort of brave stand against technocracy in favor of a gentle slide into irrelevance.
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Nostalgia is the black hole of emotions, inexorably dragging those caught in its gravity
back to a past from which nothing escapes.