Ethan Craig > Recent Status Updates

“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.”

“Right. But, you know, in the Chinese language the same symbol that means ‘danger’ also means ‘opportunity.’”

“But box turtles, buncha people want them for pets, put them in their gardens - They just like the yellow designs on them, I guess. I don’t know why they don’t just go out in the woods and look at when they want to, but then there’s a lot of things people do I don’t understand.”

“It helped me feel less sorry for myself. I had much to be grateful for, and yet my entire focus was on what was going wrong. My mood didn’t fully fit the scatterplot of life. But whose mood does?”

“I assumed that an argument, where both people are going back and forth, was the beginning of the end. What I learned later is that it is the absence of the back-and-forth that spells the end of the beginning.”

“Nonetheless, it is better to feel hopeful and optimistic about one’s life on earth while engaged in the never-ending struggle to pay rent, than to feel despondent and depressed while engaged in the same non-optional struggle anyway.”

“You can drive yourself crazy thinking about different things you could have done in the past.”

“It’s only through disruption that we can be normal again”

“Expression is the opposite of depression! Go for it!”

There is a very real possibility that if I had read this while I was still at JPM that I would’ve packed my bags and left.