what consumes me, bud caddell

I am an immortal soul tied to the body of a dying animal.

Philip K. Dick, paraphrasing W.B. Yeats.

Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.

Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, Sinan Aral.

My niche perspective is this: in the Army, firearms are much more heavily regulated than in civil society. How can so many enthusiastic gun owners say that they hold the military as a model, and yet not accept the strict regulations that go with the military’s use of firearms? […] This is another facet of rights without responsibility, or privilege without duty.

A note from an Army Officer and reader of The Atlantic.

Announcing your plans is a good way to hear god laugh.

Al Swearengen.

I’ve stopped believing I can dictate the terms of my opportunities.

Alma Garret.

On my third (or fourth?) watching of Deadwood. It really does get better each time.

Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.

Philip K. Dick.

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Let me beguile you just a little bit more about extended families. Let us talk about divorce, and that fact that one out of every three of us here has been or will be divorced. When we do it, we will very likely wrangle and wail and weep formlessly about money and sex, about treachery, about outgrowing one another, about how close love is to hate, and so on. Nobody ever gets anywhere near close to the truth, which is this: the nuclear family doesn’t provide nearly enough companionship.

I am going to write a play about the breakup of a marriage, and at the end of the play I am going to have a character say what people should say to each other in real life at the end of a marriage: “I’m sorry. You, being human, need a hundred different affectionate and like-minded companions. I’m only one person. I’ve tried, but I could never be a hundred people to you. You’ve tried, but you could never be a hundred people to me. Too bad. Goodbye.”

Kurt Vonnegut, again.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

Kurt Vonnegut.

The future will resent us in exact proportion to our failure to have attempted to meaningfully address those systemic problems that we will be known to have been quite aware of.

William Gibson.

These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.

Ta-Nehisi Coates.

It would not be easy, no—for in order to win such a battle, he would have to forbid himself the privilege of stopping, and whatever he did right he would have to repeat, as though he were already living in eternity.

Tom Junod.

This quote really nails something I’ve struggled with since starting a company. When you find something successful you have to keep repeating yourself even if you’d rather, out of vanity or boredom, stop. Forbidding yourself from stopping is a discipline we don’t talk enough about.

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.

Viktor Frankl.