I have some stickers that say, “Nobody cares about your fake life on social media.” I don't think anything sums that up better than this collection of people looking ridiculous, desperate for likes, as they pose for Instagram photos. The collection is focused on men who take photographs of their girlfriends, but men pose like this, too.
Likes aren't worth much. You just look ridiculous.
“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.”
—John Lennon paraphrasing others in his song “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)
I don't remember where I first heard this. It may have been spoken in a conversation about road rage. I think there's something very true about it, though, and it speaks to much more than driving.
When someone is unkind to you, they're probably not reacting to you. They're probably reacting to the last person who upset them.
In other words, when one is unkind or behaves strangely toward you, especially when there is no obvious explanation for their behavior, their annoyance may be misdirected. They may be treating you the way they wish they had treated someone else, someone who came before you. It's not fair, but that's life.
Apparently, psychologists call it displacement.
[The] social internet is, I would argue, not a net positive for humanity, even if it has greatly benefited some of us who use it a lot.
—John Green in Am I Cigarettes?
People are package deals; you take the good with the confused. In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin.
—Steve Jobs
The new Ghost album, Skeletá, is pretty good, even if it's not my favorite of theirs. Meliora may be at the top, and I definitely think it's their most even and refined. The lyrics on Skeletá can occasionally be cringey, not unlike Impera, but like all Ghost albums, there are some hits, and they're not all singles.
The rock ballad Guiding Lights may be my favorite song on the new album. It sounds like something that belongs on a film's soundtrack. It also contains what I consider to be genuinely useful insight. I'm embarrassed to quote Ghost, but as Seneca said, “I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.” (Not that Tobias is a bad author. He's just not who most people think of when they think of life advice.)
Anyway, the line is:
The road that leads to nowhere is long.
In other words, if you find yourself stuck, you may be on the wrong path, and continuing down it may never prove that to you. In fact, the continual belief that the reward is “just a little ways ahead” is a pretty good indication that you'll never reach it. Although it can be painful, in circumstances like those, you'd be better off turning around and trying something else. You might even find that another approach gets you to your destination more quickly than anticipated.
Einstein's Three Rules of Work: 1) Out of clutter find simplicity; 2) From discord find harmony; 3) In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
—John Archibald Wheeler
Parts of this quote are sometimes incorrectly attributed to Einstein himself. Wheeler is summarizing Einstein, not quoting him.