The Selfish Meme

A commonplace book, curating interesting ideas from the www

[vedantvarma]

Why Do We Keep Rewatching ‘Friends’?

In Memory of Matthew Perry the undisputed king of sarcasm

In ‘Friends,’ there are no profound words, no slogans, no wisdom, no morals at the end of each episode, no life lessons. They don’t tell us how to live our lives. Just how to enjoy them…

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The Difficult Balance of Intimacy and Independence: Beloved Philosopher and Poet Kahlil Gibran on the Secret to a Loving and Lasting Relatio

“Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.”

Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

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The Merger Self, the Seeker Self, and the Lifelong Challenge of Balancing Intimacy and Independence

Each time I see a sparrow inside an airport, I am seized with tenderness for the bird, for living so acutely and concretely a paradox that h

Our Merger Self… is the universal wish to be attached to another, to restore somehow the beatific closeness with mother, for in that fusion would lie perfect harmony, absolute safety, and endless time. The Merger Self is born of the frustration with our early discovery that we are indeed separate and distinct from our caregiver. It triggers a desire to totally incorporate the other, any “other” who becomes the source of love and pleasure… The Merger Self then, in its constant effort to restore closeness, desires always a safe, tight fit.

The Seeker Self is driven by the opposite wish: to be separate, independent, to explore our capacities and become master of our own destiny. This impulse is fuelled in early childhood by our delight in awakening capabilities.

It is only by getting the two sides to work in concert that eventually one becomes capable of both individuality and mutuality.

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“Our investment in reading changes the book because the book has changed us. ... If books are merely a means of transferring information, then perhaps, yes, a book is a waste of time. If a summary of its thesis and key points could be presented in a brief article or Substack post, why not just save the hours and read the Substack post? All the more if the information is outdated or questionable for one reason or another. But that mistakes what a book is for. A book is a tool. It’s a machine for thinking. And “all machines,” as Thoreau once said, “have their friction.” The time it takes to engage with ideas—whether factual or fictional, emotional or intellectual, accurate or inaccurate, efficient or inefficient—might strike some as a drag. But the time given to working through those ideas, adopting and adapting, developing or discarding, changes our minds, changes us. It’s not about the wisdom we glean. It’s about what wisdom we grow.”

Joel Miller

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The Mad Perfumer of Parma

Hilde Soliani makes feral scents that evoke everything from oysters to opera houses.

The Covid boom casually defied the entire history of perfume, in which aromatic substances have primarily been used for purposes of targeted seduction (ensnaring a mate), general attraction (wanting other people to think you smell nice) or ritual (anointing the dead, appeasing gods, expelling demons). Locked in their homes, people discovered en masse that perfume could also be a private aesthetic experience, a hobby, a form of entertainment.

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Along with others, I have grown weary of the term postmodern as the blanket characteristic covering our time. The term simply carries along

From her earliest lines, Kenyon devoted herself to the lyric poem, searching for what she called “the luminous particular.” The aim of the lyric poem is to take an event or experience of particularly impressive quality upon the poet, but to craft it with such telling detail, crisp language, and physicality of imagery that the reader feels this is his or her poem. The reader enters and owns it, rather than the poet simply declaring. The poem thus requires absolute honesty and exacting care by the poet.

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"Out of every one hundred men [in combat], ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.”

To Stop a Shooter

Why would an armed officer stand by as a school shooting unfolds?

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Richard Feynman’s Letter to Arline sixteen months after her death: “You, Dead, Are So Much Better Than Anyone Else Alive.”

"Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address."

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“Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” by Anthony Bourdain

The late chef’s 1999 essay about working in Manhattan restaurants. “Gastronomy is the science of pain,” he writes. “It was the unsavory side

I love the sheer weirdness of the kitchen life: the dreamers, the crackpots, the refugees, and the sociopaths with whom I continue to work; the ever-present smells of roasting bones, searing fish, and simmering liquids; the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the flames, the smoke, and the steam. Admittedly, it’s a life that grinds you down. Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional. We’ve all chosen to turn our backs on the nine-to-five, on ever having a Friday or Saturday night off, on ever having a normal relationship with a non-cook.

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What do you do after your dreams come true?

- Anthony Bourdain

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The Terrible Twenties? The Assholocene? What to Call Our Chaotic Era

There is something paradoxical about pinning a name on an age characterized by extreme uncertainty. But that hasn’t stopped people from tryi

The New Dark Age is “an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity,” Bridle writes. Part of what feels so particularly jarring about living right now is our ability to follow news events everywhere in the world at once as they’re broadcast in real time on social media. The crush of stuff happening only underscores our lack of agency in relation to it.

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Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore

The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over.

The platforms that have the most traction with young users today—YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch—function like broadcast stations, with one creator posting a video for her millions of followers; what the followers have to say to one another doesn’t matter the way it did on the old Facebook or Twitter. Social media “used to be more of a place for conversation and reciprocity,” Stern said. Now conversation isn’t strictly necessary, only watching and listening.

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Deep stories are important, because they allow groups who might violently disagree about politics to understand the psychological origins of their disagreement.

The Americans Who Need Chaos

They’re embracing nihilism and upending politics.

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A Mass Shooter’s Tragic Past

Amy Bishop was a neurobiologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard. What made her snap?

When violence suddenly ruptures the course of our lives, we tend to tell ourselves stories in order to make it more explicable. Confronted with scrambled pieces of evidence, we arrange them into a narrative. 

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Mastering Success: Navigating Within Your Circle of Competence

Understanding where you have an edge and where you don't can help you prevent problems, spot opportunities others miss, and rapidly learn. W

We all have a circle of competence – an area in which we have a lot of earned knowledge. 

The size of that circle is not important. What is important is knowing when you are approaching the perimeter. 

Within your circle of competence, you operate with an advantage. As you approach the perimeter (the limitations of your knowledge), your advantage starts to reduce. As you cross the perimeter, not only does your advantage vanish, but it transfers to other people. Suddenly, you find yourself playing in an area where others have an edge. 

Just because you are good at something doesn’t mean you are good at everything.

[vedantvarma]

Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out

Too much aloneness is creating a crisis of social fitness.

The rise of aloneness is a part of the erosion of America’s social infrastructure. Someone once told me that the best definition of community is “where people keep showing up.” Well, where is that now, exactly? Certainly not church; each successive generation is attending less than their parents’. Not community centers, or youth sports fields. Even the dubious community-building power of the office, arguably the last community standing for many, is weakening with the popularity of hybrid and remote work. America is suffering a kind of ritual recession, with fewer community-based routines and more entertainment for, and empowerment of, individuals and the aloneness that they choose.