Sepideh > Recent Status Updates

Yes.They'll forget us.Such is our fate, there is no help for it.What seems to us serious,significant,very important,will one day be forgotten or will seem unimportant.& it's curious that we can't possibly tell what exactly will be considered great & important,& what will seem petty & ridiculous.& it may be that our present life,which we accept so readily,will in time seem strange, inconvenient,stupid,not clean enough

"We do not see the grim coal-powered air-conditioned server farms that we activate with our internet traffic, and so do not think of our screen-staring as globe-warming and Earth-destroying. Yet it is."

"The unmistakable trend, even before Covid, was increasing anxiety and accordingly greater reluctance to learn things that might complicate a planned life path."

"The decade of my fifties had been decisive because i became aware that almost everybody was younger than I. The decade of my sixties was the most intense because of the suspicion that I no longer had the time to make mistakes. My seventies were frightening because of a certain possibility that the decade might be the last."

"I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meannes, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time."

"Thanks to her I confronted my inner self for the first time as my nintieth year went by. I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature."

"Mobility is the challenge of maturity. To break free means to move in all five dimensions. It means having a waterfall to find or a mountain to climb, a day to do it, another to reflect on it."

سالها سفر کرده بودم اما هنوز موجودی ضعیف و هراسان بودم، مردد میان حماقت و هوش، یاس و امید، شوق بودن در اجتماع و میل پنهان شدن از دیگری. هنوز هم گاهی دلم مرگ میخواست و گاهی زندگی، در شرایطی بالغ و خردمند بودم و در موقعیتی دیگر نادان و درمانده. هر بار تصور میکردم چاله ای در من پُر شده یا زخمی را درمان کرده ام، در موقعیتی غافلگیرکننده، تیرگیهای درونم عیان میشد و نوری که گمان میکردم قرار است تا ابد روشن بماند فرو مینشست.

"هر بار در زندگی معنایی می یافتم، معنا فقط لحظه ای دوام می آورد و بعد در انبوهی از ندانستن های بسیار، دود میشد و به هوا میرفت. سوالم این نبود که آیا زندگی معنایی دارد یا ندارد، این بود که اصلا چرا باید دنبال معنای زندگی باشم."

"پدرم شکل پیری من بود، آن چیزی بود که در من برگشته بود. دریچه های نگریستن من و او به جهان، حتی پیش از اینکه به این جهان بیاییم، وجود داشته است. من بیشتر عمر در چرخ و فلک اجدادی ام دویده ام. بی آنکه بدانم قسمت زیادی از آنچه من مینامم، در واقع ما، شما، آنها بوده است. شباهتهای من با خانواده ام و مردم روستا بیش از آن بود که تصور میکردم، من تمامِ کسانی بودم که مرا آفریده بودند."

"فقط ساکت به حرفهایش گوش میدادم و نگاه میکردم به خطوط شکسته صورتش که کم کم روی صورت من هم هویدا میشد. به پیوند ناگریزِ بودنِ من و او فکر میکردم و به مکرر بودنِ ما. تمام عمر نخواسته بودم او باشم اما مثل او میخندیدم و مثل او تعجب میکردم و دندانهای جلوییم از همانجا میپوسید که دندانهای او."

"...as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them."

"How could any Lord have made this world? She asked. With her mind she had just seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit, she knew that. No happiness lasted, she knew that."

"...She must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering, death, the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer."

"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries."

"After WWII researchers found that contact was the only thing that reliably reduced intergroup conflict."

The trait that people high in Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) & Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) overwhelmingly share is their extreme intolerance toward outsiders who seem to threaten their group identity.
People with SDO are threatened by outsiders competing for dominance over their group, while people with RWA are threathened by outsiders who do not represent "the oneness & sameness that makes 'us' an 'us' ".

"This blindness is far darker force than even prejudice. Unable to summon empathy for outsiders, we feel no connection to their suffering. Aggression is permissible. Rules, norms, and morals for their humane treatment no longer apply."

"The human self-domestication hypothesis suggests our worst behaviors toward other groups cannot be explained as mere 'negative feeling' toward others.It suggests we also evolved the ability to dampen the activity of the mental network that produces the unique features of our theory of mind. This allows us to blind ourselves to the humanity of people outside our group when we feel threatened."

"As our species was shaped by self-domestication, our increased friendliness also brought a new form of aggression.
A higher availability of serotonin during human brain growth increased the impact of oxytocin on our behavior. Group members had the ability to connect to one another, and the bonds among them were so strong, they felt like family. Caregiving behavior extended to a variety of social partners."

But our friendliness has a dark side.When we feel that the group we love is threatened by a different social group, we are capable of unplugging the threatening group from our mental network, which allows us to dehumanize them.
Incapable of empathizing with threatening outsiders,we can't see them as fellow humans and become capable of the worst forms of cruelty.We are both the most tolerant and most merciless species

“Why, why had I not known her before? Why had I not seen her when I still had the chance of seeing her? I don’t know how it happened, but I suddenly felt that I had grown old. My youth was somewhere far, far away, somewhere in the past, and it would never return.”

"Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along."

"Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice."

"It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life!"

"This solitude oppressed her; she was accustomed to have her thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted. It was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong."

"We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let is rather love one another and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world sorrow."

"It isn't that China's state is despotic because it sends its citizens to reeducation camps. It sends people to camps because it can, and it can because it is despotic, unrestrained by- and unaccountable to- society."

"حالا باور دارم که اندیشه های ما تنها در صحنه عمل میتوانند بگویند که چقدر درست اندیشیده شده اند."

"هنوزم که هنوز است نمیدانم که روحم صلح طلب بود یا که میترسیدم!
هنوز نمیدانم که از جنگ در کوه ها و با تفنگ می هراسیدم یا از ته وجود باور داشتم که راه نجات کردستان از لوله های تفنگ نمیگذرد."