angst,

— Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“You’re a slut and a whore for the algorithm. I couldn’t do it anymore. You can never feed it enough. You start out making art, and hoping that the door will open. You’re looking for that viral moment so it opens up the door and you can do the thing full time. But you start to compromise just to get the door to open: guessing what it wants, debasing yourself, alienating yourself. Until you’re not even in service to your art anymore. You’re in service to the algorithm. Deep down every artist just wants to be seen. Everyone does. And that’s how it controls you. The algorithm makes you behave in a certain way, create in a certain way, in exchange for being seen. And if something can change what you do, it can change who you are. And I didn’t sign up for that. I didn’t sign up to become a content creator. Art was supposed to be a way for me to be in search of, in service to, in community with. It was my ministry. Art was supposed to be my ministry.”

Keanu Reeves as characters named John/Jon

“I worked as a legal assistant for 50 years. And I’ve always been lucky to work for honest, kind, brilliant attorneys. All that paperwork might seem boring to other people. But I never even took lunch, that’s how much I loved it. I loved the law. It’s very precise. My work needed to be exactly right. And there was a lot of pride there. But something seems to have changed in the culture. So many of my coworkers would rush out the door at 5 o’clock. With important, unfinished things on their desk. In law you have to get things out quickly, but it’s like they just didn’t care. Maybe it’s a generational thing. I’m older, I’m 77. So maybe there’s something I don’t get. ‘Quiet quitting,’ and all of that, I just don’t understand it. If it’s just a paycheck to you, if you’re getting by on the minimum, and not trying to be perfect, or God forbid, if you’re screwing it up on purpose,  why are you even going to work? Save your pennies and quit. Find something else you can take pride in. If you’re spending eight hours a day on something you don’t take pride in, it seems to me that somewhere, deep down inside, you’re a phony. Maybe not a phony. But you’re deluding yourself. It’s going to spill over into the rest of your life. And there’s not enough money for me. Well, $20,000 a week maybe. But otherwise there’s not enough money for me to not take pride in my work. I couldn’t do it. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I can’t. You know how people text, and there’s like spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes and everything? Not me. I’ll reread everything. I’ll go back and fix it, I’ll put in the comma. That’s who I am. You either have it or you don’t, and less people have it now. I think it was the digital revolution. When I first started working there were typewriters. If you made a mistake, you had to redo it. You had to be careful, you had to get it right, until the computer came along. I remember my boss was so excited about the computer age. He said: ‘It’s going to be great! We’re going to have a paperless office!’ I knew better. I told him: ‘There’s going to be a lot more paper, actually.’ Because you can reprint everything. And nobody’s going to care anymore.’”

(Manila, Philippines)

Plato, Sophist (via philosophybits)

You gotta have a plan…

“I almost married my high school sweetheart. She was a sharp girl. Very kind. Long brown hair, slim– the whole package. We moved to California together after graduation. We spent all our time together. We were in love. We even talked about marriage several times. Then one morning she decided she didn’t want to do it anymore. She told me things had changed. It destroyed me. Ever since then, she’s been the one that I’ve always wondered about. I actually saw her a couple years ago. She came to New York for her father’s funeral, and we took a walk in Central Park together. I hadn’t seen her in forty-five years. She looked amazing. Exactly the same as I remembered. She had two kids. She’d gotten married to some guy from Yale. Toward the end of our walk, she told me that if she could do it all over again, she probably would have never married the guy. I said: ‘That breaks my heart, because all these years I imagined you were happy.’ Of course, there might have been a small part of me that was thinking: ‘Haha! You married the wrong guy.’”