Caleb Krugman

“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“For the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“Is satori something that is not at all capable of intellectual analysis? Yes, it is an experience which no amount of explanation or argument can make communicable to others unless the latter themselves had it previously. If satori is amenable to analysis in the sense that by so doing it becomes perfectly clear to another who has never had it, that satori will be no satori. For a satori turned into a concept ceases to be itself; and there will no more be a Zen experience.”
― D.T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism

“What happens when those of us living at the pace of fashion try to insert an awareness of these much larger cycles into our everyday activity?

In other words, what's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year impact of tossing that plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant. Unless we're living in utter harmony with nature, thinking in ten-thousand-year spans is an invitation to a nightmarish obsession. It's a potentially burdensome, even paralyzing, state of mind. Each present action becomes a black hole of possibilities and unintended consequences. We must walk through life as if we had traveled in to the past, aware that any change we make—even moving an ashtray two inches to the left—could ripple through time and alter the course of history. It's less of a Long Now than a Short Forever.

This weight on every action—this highly leveraged sense of the moment—hints at another form of present shock that is operating in more ways and places than we may suspect. We'll call this temporal compression overwinding—the effort to squish really big timescales into much smaller or nonexistent ones. It's the effort to make the "now" responsible for the sorts of effects that actually take real time to occur—just like overwinding a watch in the hope that it will gather up more potential energy and run longer than it can.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now