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"How do we forgive ourselves for all the things we did not become?"

- Doc Luben; 14 Lines from Love Letters or Suicide Notes

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Stop mistaking shared trauma for compatibility

Arah Iloabugichukwu

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Stockholm syndrome, a term used to describe the distorted relationship between kidnappers and their victims turned defenders, demonstrates one form these bonds can take over time. While confusing to us on the outside, Stockholm syndrome creates a mental escape for victims by reconfiguring the brain to find comfort in its captivity.

Arah Iloabugichukwu

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From that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again. But today, I get it. I understand that existential angst. You work so long and hard to accomplish what feels like crazy pie-in-the-sky dreams. When success comes flooding in, you expect the high to last. You expect it will feel wonderful and exciting, but it doesn’t. In fact, it doesn’t really feel like anything at all. Maybe it feels even worse than nothing because you expected something so different. The problem is not what you have been doing, but why you’ve been doing it. You thought that doing important or impressive work would make you happy. Yet the opposite is true: Being happy will help you do important and impressive work, and quite possibly better and more pure work.

Ryan Holiday

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Your numbness isn’t feeling nothing, it’s feeling everything and never having learned to process anything at all.

brianna wiest

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Just incase you still weren't sure.

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The core of the problem is power. Conservatives like philanthropy because it keeps power in the hands of the powerful. But we should want a world where nobody’s human dignity and inherent value is made conditional to the generosity of billionaires. Leftists should stand against philanthropy — not because helping people is wrong, but because maintaining permanent classes of “philanthropists” and the “less fortunate” does nothing more than guarantee the persistence of poverty and a moral ambiguity around men who steal from billions, feed hundreds, and claim moral superiority because of it.

Matthew Barad

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Culture tells us that our worth is in our beauty while simultaneously telling us that we aren’t beautiful, while also showing us that if we’re too beautiful, men hurt us.

Caitlin Johnstone

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The question isn’t — “which ideology killed more people?!” It’s “is there something funny going on in the fact that two great ideologies warred for control over the world, and killed millions of people, yet both called it ‘progress’”? You think you know it, I’m sure — but do you? — when ideas become ideologies, something goes badly wrong. But what, exactly? Ideologies replace our humanity. Our free will. Our freedom to think. Our curiosity. Our empathy and defiance and grace and burning need for meaning, purpose, and intimacy. Ideology says: you can have all these things you need, as long as you don’t just obey — but believe. Without question. Then obedience follows naturally. But now you have given up all that is truest in you — yourself. And ideologues in that way, whether capitalists or communists or fundamentalists or eugenicists, have only course left: to impose their system on everyone else. To create clones of themselves. That’s the only meaning, victory, or triumph that there really when ideas become ideology. No surprise, then, that the history of the modern world is the history of two ideologies, striving to clone themselves in every human mind across the globe, each one killing everyone it encountered that it couldn’t make a clone. And in that way, any ideology, really, is a weapon of mass destruction.

Umair Haque

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“Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.”

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Fernando Pessoa 

❤

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“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”

— Terence McKenna

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“If we’re going to talk, then let’s talk. Forget about what is polite or proper and delve right into what is sincere and honest. Lead me down through the labyrinth of your true, spectacular self. I am not interested in pleasantries. If you want a conversation, then let’s get lost.”

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“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Mith