R.J.

“I felt like living my life through screens had trapped me in this dark little cell, my own black box of doom.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“At the risk of stating the obvious: nobody is going to make America great again. Nobody even seriously imagines it to be a possibility. America might, it is true, eventually stop outsourcing its manufacturing to China, but if those jobs are ever brought back home, they will return in the form of automated labor. Robots and algorithms will not make America great again—unless by “America” you mean billionaires, and by “great” you mean even richer. Its middle class has been gutted, sold off for scrap. Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood—a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“The only way to learn is to live.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts – be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can.

Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.

Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are.

These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential.

Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defence, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude. A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world – that will be you, my young friend, the earth shaking at your feet.”
― Nick Cave