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Sally Wen Mao, from The Kenyon Review (Mar/Apr 2020)

if you're a human adult you physically need to eat actual vegetables, read real books, work, exercise, be outdoors, have sex, and have other real adult humans to talk to all on at LEAST a weekly basis or else you go will literally go completely insane and the problem is too many people choose to skip all those basic needs on purpose

lesb0

"I'm depressed and always tired and my body is in mysterious pain all the time for no reason" yeah you've spent a whole month isolated except for talking to online people and coworkers and eating convenience store snacks for half your meals with 0 physical activity like that isn't passive self harm. of course your body doesn't like that, it's exhausting

peristasis

You look at trees and call them 'trees', and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a 'star', and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, 'tree', 'star', were [in their original forms] names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of 'trees' and 'stars' saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jewelled tent, and the earth as the womb when ceall living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was 'myth-woven and elf-patterned'.

J.R.R. Tolkien quoted in The Inklings (1978) by Humprey Carpenter