Ali Cem

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Missing Out: In P...
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Ted Chiang
“Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it's appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That's when it becomes addictive.

Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks - call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex - and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks.

Biologists call this "supernormal stimulus" [...] Our beauty receptors receive more stimulation than they were evolved to handle; we're seeing more beauty in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime. And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives.

How? The way any drug becomes a problem: by interfering with our relationships with other people. We become dissatisfied with the way ordinary people look because they can't compare to supermodels.”
Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

Mircea Eliade
“As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth.”
Mircea Eliade

George R.R. Martin
“It was queer how sometimes a child's innocent eyes can see things that grown men are blind to.”
George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

Frank Herbert
“The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
Frank Herbert, Dune

Walter M. Miller Jr.
“You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

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