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

“Certain things acquired an evil complexion if phrased, but remained harmless in the mind.”
― R.K. Narayan, The Vendor of Sweets

“The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous