#triviality

[wemmmmm2026]

Silent triviality

[madame-helen]

[thepursuitofunderstanding]

Death reveals to us that our lives have been one long miscalculation, based on triviality.

Colin Wilson

[macrolit]

What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality.

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) Austrian journalist and novelist

[nihalthemartian]

"I come here whenever I want to be reminded of how insignificant I am in the grand scale of the universe.....Space is the best cure for sadness that I know.”

“Feeling insignificant isn’t exactly a great cure for unhappiness.”

“Hell yeah it is. When I look up into the night sky, I remember that I’m nothing but the ashes of long-dead stars. A human being is a collection of atoms that comes together into an ordered pattern for a brief period of time and then falls apart again. I find comfort in my smallness.”

[philosophybits]

Triviality is evil — triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.

Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems

[rainbowtwo]

Triviality Drops Away

‘One’s attitude to death is very important in Buddhism. When we forget our mortality and the mortality of our loved ones, it is possible for our priorities to go haywire, and for us to become bamboozled into thinking that all kinds of peripheral things - wealth, status, popularity - are of the essence. Sometimes it takes an angina attack or a stroke to remind us of what we value most. In one of his books about the Yacqui Indian sage Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda reports him as saying, “When your death makes a gesture to you, an enormous weight of triviality drops away.’ Though, being forgetful, it is perfectly possible for us to pick it up again!’

- Guy Claxton, The Heart of Buddhism: Practical Wisdom for an Agitated World