TURKI ALSHAREEF

“The vast majority of the energy-expensive tissue in our skulls is devoted to processing and organizing information. We are also almost certainly unique in terms of the amount of heat-generating work these otherwise immobile organs do, by generating electric pulses when mulling over the often trivial information our senses gather. Thus when we sleep we dream; when we are awake we constantly seek out stimulation and engagement; and when we are deprived of information we suffer.”
― James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

“There is an art to losing, and like all art, it can be developed.”
― Norman E. Rosenthal, Poetry Rx: How 50 Inspiring Poems Can Heal and Bring Joy To Your Life

“There are also many other species who, like us, seem to spend an awful lot of energy doing work that seems to serve no obvious purpose or who have evolved physical and behavioral traits that are hard to account for because they seem so ostentatiously inefficient. Traits like the tail of a male peacock.”
― James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

“The missionary then told his congregation how after the Lord had instructed Adam and Eve to care for the Garden of Eden they were seduced by the serpent into committing mortal sin, as a result of which the Almighty “cursed the ground” and banished the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve to a life of toil in the fields. This particular Bible story made more sense to the Ju/’hoansi than many others the missionaries told them—and not just because they all knew what it meant to be tempted to sleep with people they knew they shouldn’t. In it they saw a parable of their own recent history. All the old Ju/’hoansi at Skoonheid remembered when this land was their sole domain and when they lived exclusively by hunting for wild animals and gathering wild fruits, tubers, and vegetables. They recalled that back then, like Eden, their desert environment was eternally (if temperamentally) provident and almost always gave them enough to eat on the basis of a few, often spontaneous, hours’ effort. Some now speculated that it must have been as a result of some similar mortal sin on their part that, starting in the 1920s, first a trickle then a flood of white farmers and colonial police arrived in the Kalahari with their horses, guns, water pumps, barbed wire, cattle, and strange laws, and claimed all this land for themselves.”
― James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots