Kieran > Recent Status Updates

"Yes, we’re all older now. And perhaps the past glows brighter as it recedes ever further. But what we face is not the past – it is the present"

The success and advance of incompetents is a universal mystery, yes? Some would say it is because those above prefer subordinates who do not threaten them. I do not agree. I would say such reasoning only reveals that person’s own preferences. Myself, I would want only the most skilled and accomplished around me– how else might one be more assured of success?’

She turned, balanced with both arms outstretched, waiting.

“Don’t forget about me! Take care of yourself!” He tried to make it sound without weight, sentences that could float away into the air. Nothing that mattered.

We must trust our thoughts while we sleep. We must trust our hunches. We must begin to examine all of those things that we think of as irrational simply because we do not understand them. In other words, we must distrust the rational, the logical, the sane, in an attempt to reach for something higher, for something more worthy. Brilliance and bullshit both. A binary trapped in its single-minded focus on solutions.

"the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality."

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.

The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.

Curiosity could be a powerful distraction.

We had also been ordered not to share our journal entries with one another. Too much shared information could skew our observations, our superiors believed. But I knew from experience how hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

Think pretty. Conceive of yourself as dashing, debonair, cool, filled with panache and aplomb. And soon the aura spreads out from inside you, and all them tender juicy items are pausing to reconsider you. Because, friends and neighbors, we live in a Time of Beautiful People. Gorgeous is revered. We can’t stand anything even remotely ordinary; it has to be young and lovely."

"At most, recognizing that our history was inspired by many tales we now recognize as false should make us alert, ready to call constantly into question the very tales we believe true, because the criterion of the wisdom of the community is based on constant awareness of the fallibility of our learning."

"The social theory of conspiracy, Popper says, is a consequence of the end of God as a reference point and of the consequent question, Who is there in his place? This place is now occupied by various men and powerful, sinister groups that can be blamed for having organized the Great Depression and all the evils we suffer."