Shaun Cox

“it is my experience that people are in a sense trapped within themselves, that we all view reality in particular ways and act accordingly, without the possibility of stepping outside ourselves and seeing that that reality is only one of many possible realities, and that we could just as well have acted differently, with as much justification.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Spring

“In social networks, the function of "friends" is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Müdigkeitsgesellschaft

“But imagine then, my little one, a state of being truly lonely, in which you don’t know anyone, don’t talk to anyone, and where nobody sees you, they merely look away. Such absolute loneliness would be impossible to live in, for why would one go on living at all? Everything within us is directed towards others. Language is directed towards others, and with it our thoughts, and with them, as the innermost existential truth, also the self. As long as the self exists in a space where there are others, even if only in the form of a voice on the radio, a face on TV, a narrator in a book, there is meaning, it can lead a meaningful life. But because the self is structured as an address to someone else, if it is deprived of others it can only be maintained by the will, and since the will of the self is merely the will for there to be others, sooner or later, if not even the slightest hope remains, the self will be extinguished.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Spring

“Moreover, it is curious how democracy favours breeding over immigration. Offspring have a presumed right to citizenship, while potential immigrants do not. Imagine a polarized state consisting of two opposing ethnic groups. One increases its size by breeding and the other by immigration. Depending on who holds power, the group that grows by immigration will either be prevented from growing or it will be accused of colonialism. But why should democracy favour one indigenous group over another merely because one breeds rather than increases by immigration? Why should breeding be unlimited but immigration curtailed where political outcomes are equally sensitive to both ways of enhancing population? Some may seek to answer this question by arguing that a right to procreative freedom is more important than a right to immigrate. That may indeed be an accurate description of the way the law actually works, but we can question whether that is the way it should be. Should somebody’s freedom to create a person be more inviolable than somebody else’s freedom to have a friend or family member immigrate?”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence