Ethan Craig > Recent Status Updates

“Maximizers are less satisfied with their decisions and their lives, less optimistic, less happy, more prone to regret, and more likely to endlessly compare themselves to others. It’s not that relatives satificers have low standards; they can have high standards. It’s that they *have standards at all* other than ‘best imaginable,’ so they create the possibility of satisfaction with their choices.”

“Allendale’s January 8 ritual is a form of what social scientists call a ‘commitment device’: a self-imposed restriction of freedom in service of a larger goal.

…

Commitment devices have been shown to help people save more money (when they open accounts with limited withdrawal windows) and exercise more (using voluntary contracts in which participants have to pay if they skip too many days).”

“One thing that I have learned is that there is just enough variety in human experience for every single person in a city the size of New York to feel with assurance that their experience is unique ... Because to aspire, to fall in love, to stumble as we do and yet soldier on, at some level we must believe that what we are going through has never been experienced quite as we have experienced it.”

‘Whatever the motivation, it was a fait accompli. Half unconsciously, almost reflexively, I’d invited her out to dinner, and she’d accepted. Many things in life are like that, though, if you think about it—moving ahead on their own without regard for the intention intentions or plans of the person involved. To take it a step further, I’d have to say at this point I was bereft of any intentions or plans.’

‘Nowadays, though, anyone can check what day of the week they were born on in less than ten seconds. The boy could come up with the answer in one second. This wasn’t a shootout in a Western, but how much practical difference was there between ten seconds and one? I felt a little sad for the boy. The world was, day by day, becoming a more convenient, and unromantic, place.

‘Age doesn’t matter, or whether you go through trials, or sexual experiences. The only thing that matters is whether that is, for you, a hundred percent. The feelings of love you had for the girl when you were sixteen and seventeen were truly pure. One hundred percent genuine. You came across your partner at an early stage in life. You had to meet her, maybe I should say.’

‘People are like a breath; their days are like a fleeting shadow.’

‘There was something hard to fathom about me —— I could see that. Because I myself didn’t have a good grasp of who I was. I thought about this as I gazed at the mountain scenery passing by. Maybe the person most puzzled about me was . . . me.

I cooked meals for myself, worked out at the gym, kept everything nice and neat around me, and when I had free time, I read. Regularity is key to a single life, even if at times it was hard to draw a line between regularity and tedium.

To others, my life might have looked free and easy and it’s true that I was thankful for the freedom and quiet. This was the kind of lifestyle a person like me could accept…

“What I’d like to say to you is this — when you have a plate on top of your head it’s best not to look up at the sky.”

“If the Americans mean to teach us about democracy, the lesson is quite remarkable.”

“I sensed that the sun was going down on many things I believed in.”

“The lesson to be learned is that evolution (change) doesn’t happen without stress, and it can happen quickly.”

The internal email from the CEO unironically has a lot of parallels to the scene in The Matrix where Cypher yearns to go back to the unknown, before he entered the rabbit hole after taking the red pill.

“The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out.”

“Life wasn’t giving me a lot to go on right then. Regular cookies would have made my day.”

“To be committed is to be in danger”

“But the way memory animates the past is more real than the present.”

“That I was only now beginning the process of mourning did not occur to me.
Until now I had been able to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day.”

"I said that I still made many phone calls to feel not alone. That actually being out in the world felt too loud and overbearing now. That being in the presence of things made me more aware of the way I was experiencing their absence -- everything existed in silhouette."

“She told me she would rather be a voice that’s faceless than a face that’s voiceless”

“He agreed with the interviewer that forgiving people is something we do for ourselves.”