Vikas Gupta

“What is the meaning of life?” No pressure, Alan! His reply did not disappoint: You have to try and find out what you want, and so I went into that very thoroughly, what do I want to happen? And of course as soon as you ask yourself that you begin to fantasize, and our amazing technology is of course an expression of human desire, desire for power, for what we want to achieve. So I simply set myself to thinking through how far we could go. And so I soon found myself at a great push-button place, where I had a fantastic mechanism with buttons available for every conceivable thing I could wish. So I spent quite a bit of time playing with those . . . you press one button and here’s Cleopatra . . . and press this button and symphonic music, in sixteen-channel sound . . . all possible pleasures are available . . . You suddenly notice there’s a button labeled “Surprise.” You push that, and here we are.”
― Matt Johnson, Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains

“They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.”
― Victor Hugo