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“why are trying so hard to fit in, when you're born to stand out”
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“Do your own thing on your own terms and get what you came here for”
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“Music is my higher power”
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“Friend, you're HOPELESSLY hooked!”
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“backing down can become a way of life”
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“By far the most significant consequence of "selfish capitalism" (Thatch/Blatcherism) has been a startling increase in the incidence of mental illness in both children and adults since the 1970s.”
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“This and countless later experiences working in and around the world of "shrinks" and the mentally ill has led me to the conclusion that overinterpretation of human psychology can be inadvisable. My favorite Freud joke has him sitting in his gentlemen's club in Vienna after dinner, enjoying a cigar. A hostile colleague wanders up and says, "That's a big, fat, long cigar, Professor Freud," to which Freud replies, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life
“Human kind cannot bear very much reality’.”
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
“Playfulness is the cornerstone of emotional fulfilment, a key to insight and volition. It can be activated by any kind of everyday task from gardening to washing up. Although we need to earn a living, and although there are many practical tasks we have to perform, living as playfully as possible makes our existence infinitely more worthwhile.”
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
“Neurosis is the rule, not the exception’, and grasping this can help us to see that we are not alone. It is also the starting point for understanding what went wrong and learning that we have a choice: we can simply re-enact the past, or we can rewrite the script.”
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
“Indeed, half the battle of living a playful life lies in committing yourself to authentic communication. The fun of engagement with others soon follows.”
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
“A man visits a psychiatrist and tells him that his wife thinks she is a chicken. The psychiatrist asks why the man does not leave her, to which the man replies, ‘I need the eggs.’ That pretty much sums up all the marriages that I have ever known: each person needs the other’s madness.”
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
“How we react to our friends as well as who we pick as a lover, our abilities and interests at work, in fact almost everything about our psychology as an adult is continually reflecting our childhood in our day-to-day, moment-by-moment experience.”
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
“There was not a single smoker in Europe before the sixteenth century, because until then there was no tobacco there. Very few women smoked until the twentieth century; now the habit is more popular among young women than among young men. To say that individual differences in smoking are half caused by genes is simply not true. It all depends on the environment in which the individual is living.”
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
“That genes explain our behaviour and well-being distracts attention from society as a cause; such ideas also encourage us to accept or pursue chemical, physical solutions, not social change.”
― The Selfish Capitalist - Origins of Affluenza
― The Selfish Capitalist - Origins of Affluenza
“psychiatrists who believe the illness is largely genetic find hard to explain: at least 20 per cent of schizophrenics completely recover, most of them able to live their lives without any drug treatment at all. A telling example of a recovered schizophrenic is Rufus May. Not only did he become wholly sane but, having done so, he trained as a clinical psychologist and now treats schizophrenics in a community project”
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
“[The Death of Ivan Ilych is] possibly the best short story ever written, depending on whether or not you consider The Leopard [Giuseppe di Lampedusa] to be a short story, but it is only about 50 pages or so. It describes how easy it is to go through life, in the same way as Eliot describes in ‘Prufrock’, trying to please everyone and to be a good person, to conform, without really having any authentic intimacy with anyone. And the great importance really of waking up and smelling the coffee and seeing that the superficial things in life really are superficial and that what actually matters is how you conduct yourself in your relationships with your intimates. Well [Tolstoy]... was [bad at that], yes. And, er, that’s true, of course, of many authors. They can be extraordinarily adept at writing stories about the things that they are unable to do themselves.
[Defining authentic intimacy...] ...that’s a whole subject but sincerity is that you feel passionately that something is real and important, as opposed to authenticity where you divine internal truth, your true feeling and also external truth, the true feeling of other people. It’s not about being Tony Blair who is sincere but inauthentic; it’s about being… well, who? It’s very difficult to know, though, because these people are so good at presenting themselves. Somebody who is authentic in the public eye… well, very few people. Most high achievers are not very authentic. Unless you know people very well it’s hard to judge.
[I suppose the point of superficiality is that it’s a defence against vulnerability. Being authentic makes you terribly vulnerable.]
I don’t think it’s the same thing as telling the truth. My mother, in her later years after my father died, was a good example of someone who became very wise when she got older. If she watched me doing something stupid, she wouldn’t say: ‘Oh, don’t be so stupid,’ but she’d ask a question: ‘I wonder if you’ve thought about this or that?’ If I didn’t want to hear any more she would let it go. She didn’t try to impose her version on me but at the same time she tried to signal what she felt was true. She certainly didn’t tell lies.
An authentic person in an inauthentic environment, like a corporate headquarters or a television company, might need to construct quite an elaborate persona and it might entail… well, keeping your mouth shut a lot.”
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[Defining authentic intimacy...] ...that’s a whole subject but sincerity is that you feel passionately that something is real and important, as opposed to authenticity where you divine internal truth, your true feeling and also external truth, the true feeling of other people. It’s not about being Tony Blair who is sincere but inauthentic; it’s about being… well, who? It’s very difficult to know, though, because these people are so good at presenting themselves. Somebody who is authentic in the public eye… well, very few people. Most high achievers are not very authentic. Unless you know people very well it’s hard to judge.
[I suppose the point of superficiality is that it’s a defence against vulnerability. Being authentic makes you terribly vulnerable.]
I don’t think it’s the same thing as telling the truth. My mother, in her later years after my father died, was a good example of someone who became very wise when she got older. If she watched me doing something stupid, she wouldn’t say: ‘Oh, don’t be so stupid,’ but she’d ask a question: ‘I wonder if you’ve thought about this or that?’ If I didn’t want to hear any more she would let it go. She didn’t try to impose her version on me but at the same time she tried to signal what she felt was true. She certainly didn’t tell lies.
An authentic person in an inauthentic environment, like a corporate headquarters or a television company, might need to construct quite an elaborate persona and it might entail… well, keeping your mouth shut a lot.”
―
“Americans are six times more likely to suffer than citizens of Shanghai (China) and Nigeria. In general, citizens of English-speaking nations are twice as likely to suffer as those in mainland Europe. This is extremely unlikely to be anything to do with genes since they share the same genetic stock, and I have argued elsewhere that the reason is Selfish Capitalist governance. Likewise, if you compare rates in Singapore and China, the populations of which also share genes, they are far higher in the (Americanized-Anglicized) Singapore.”
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
“Don’t ask questions. 2. Learn from them as the experts on their disability. 3. Always agree with everything they say, never interrupting them.”
― Contented Dementia: 24-hour Wraparound Care for Lifelong Well-being
― Contented Dementia: 24-hour Wraparound Care for Lifelong Well-being
“Maddiyata düşkün olanlar duygusal olarak daha güvensiz, daha düzeysiz kişisel ilişkilere sahip, daha içtenliksiz, özerklik duygusu daha eksik, kendine güveni daha düşük kimselerdir. Çocuk iseler, kendilerini başarılarına bağlı olarak seven, onları maddiyatçı yetiştiren ana-babaları vardır.”
― The Selfish Capitalist - Origins of Affluenza
― The Selfish Capitalist - Origins of Affluenza
“There is no way back to certainty, simplicity and innocence, only the way forward into confusion, uncertainty and knowingness. The gasps of wonder become the sardonic bark of disbelief. Absurdity is the new sublime”
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“{The Death of Ivan Ilych is} possibly the best short story ever written, depending on whether or not you consider The Leopard [Giuseppe di Lampedusa] to be a short story, but it is only about 50 pages or so. It describes how easy it is to go through life, in the same way as Eliot describes in ‘Prufrock’, trying to please everyone and to be a good person, to conform, without really having any authentic intimacy with anyone. And the great importance really of waking up and smelling the coffee and seeing that the superficial things in life really are superficial and that what actually matters is how you conduct yourself in your relationships with your intimates. Well [Tolstoy]... was [bad at that], yes. And, er, that’s true, of course, of many authors. They can be extraordinarily adept at writing stories about the things that they are unable to do themselves.
[Defining authentic intimacy...] ...that’s a whole subject but sincerity is that you feel passionately that something is real and important, as opposed to authenticity where you divine internal truth, your true feeling and also external truth, the true feeling of other people. It’s not about being Tony Blair who is sincere but inauthentic; it’s about being… well, who? It’s very difficult to know, though, because these people are so good at presenting themselves. Somebody who is authentic in the public eye… well, very few people. Most high achievers are not very authentic. Unless you know people very well it’s hard to judge.
[I suppose the point of superficiality is that it’s a defence against vulnerability. Being authentic makes you terribly vulnerable.]
I don’t think it’s the same thing as telling the truth. My mother, in her later years after my father died, was a good example of someone who became very wise when she got older. If she watched me doing something stupid, she wouldn’t say: ‘Oh, don’t be so stupid,’ but she’d ask a question: ‘I wonder if you’ve thought about this or that?’ If I didn’t want to hear any more she would let it go. She didn’t try to impose her version on me but at the same time she tried to signal what she felt was true. She certainly didn’t tell lies.
An authentic person in an inauthentic environment, like a corporate headquarters or a television company, might need to construct quite an elaborate persona and it might entail… well, keeping your mouth shut a lot.”
―
[Defining authentic intimacy...] ...that’s a whole subject but sincerity is that you feel passionately that something is real and important, as opposed to authenticity where you divine internal truth, your true feeling and also external truth, the true feeling of other people. It’s not about being Tony Blair who is sincere but inauthentic; it’s about being… well, who? It’s very difficult to know, though, because these people are so good at presenting themselves. Somebody who is authentic in the public eye… well, very few people. Most high achievers are not very authentic. Unless you know people very well it’s hard to judge.
[I suppose the point of superficiality is that it’s a defence against vulnerability. Being authentic makes you terribly vulnerable.]
I don’t think it’s the same thing as telling the truth. My mother, in her later years after my father died, was a good example of someone who became very wise when she got older. If she watched me doing something stupid, she wouldn’t say: ‘Oh, don’t be so stupid,’ but she’d ask a question: ‘I wonder if you’ve thought about this or that?’ If I didn’t want to hear any more she would let it go. She didn’t try to impose her version on me but at the same time she tried to signal what she felt was true. She certainly didn’t tell lies.
An authentic person in an inauthentic environment, like a corporate headquarters or a television company, might need to construct quite an elaborate persona and it might entail… well, keeping your mouth shut a lot.”
―
“Már az 1940-es években megfigyelték, hogy a személytelen intézményekben elhelyezett árvák testi és lelki sérülést szenvednek. A hospitalizáció letargiát, a legalapvetőbb társas és kognitív készségek fejletlenségét, valamint a fertőzésekre és betegségekre való rendkívüli érzékenységet jelenti. Az árvaházakban nevelkedő gyermekek sokkal jobban fejlődtek, ha az intézmény szorgalmazta az egyéni kapcsolatot a gondozóval. Az elhanyagolt csecsemők nem az érzékszervi deprivációtól sérültek – mondjuk, mert nem volt a kiságyukban elegendő játék, amely stimulálhatta volna őket –, s még csak nem is az édesanyjuk hiányától. Az lett volna kulcsfontosságú számukra, hogy valaki jól ismerje őket, és megértse egyéni szükségleteiket, képességeiket, sajátosságaikat és sérülékenységeiket.”
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“How would you define authentic intimacy?
That’s a whole subject but sincerity is that you feel passionately that something is real and important, as opposed to authenticity where you divine internal truth, your true feeling and also external truth, the true feeling of other people. It’s not about being Tony Blair who is sincere but inauthentic; it’s about being… well, who?”
―
That’s a whole subject but sincerity is that you feel passionately that something is real and important, as opposed to authenticity where you divine internal truth, your true feeling and also external truth, the true feeling of other people. It’s not about being Tony Blair who is sincere but inauthentic; it’s about being… well, who?”
―
“the UNICEF State of the World’s Children report for 2001 stated that ‘for a government that wants to improve the lot of its people, investing in the first years of life is the best money it can spend. But tragically, both for children and for nations, these are the years that receive the least attention.”
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
― They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition
