A book about hope. About our desperate chase for it. How easily it’s lost and what happens when we don’t have it; How to instill it, and how to overcome it.
📝 “Today appealing to the hopeless is easier than ever before. All you need is a social media account. Start to posting extreme and crazy shit and let the algorithm do the rest.”
📝 Intellectually understanding that we should change a behavior doesn’t help. “Emotional problems needs emotional solutions”. Being more empathetic to myself really helped me quit nicotine.
📝 “While pain is inevitable, suffering is always a choice.”
📝 “Science is singularly responsible for all the greatest invention and advances in human history.” It introduced the concept of growth. Before that the average human died in the same economic state she was born.
📝 Blue dot effect 🔵:
If we expect to see something, we start to see it even where there is none. This has terrible implications for almost everything.
“The better things get, the more we perceive threats where there are none and the more upset we become.” Being a victim of violence used to mean that someone physically harmed someone. Today some use the word violence to describe words that make them feel uncomfortable.
📝 In the lunchroom at the department store where I worked as a teen everyone would discuss shows that aired the night before on TV. We all watched the same tv-shows and sat on the same sofas. Social cohesion held the western societies together. Then the Internet came with endless options and varieties! Maybe we miss the old days?
(ps. Is this why people love Game of Thrones? Because it’s the last shared distraction we have?).
📝 “Most people avoid meditation like a kid avoiding homework.”
⚖️ VERDICT:
Unstructured, oversimplified and a thin overarching theme? Yes, at times. But I thoroughly enjoyed it and it opened my eyes to subjects and problems that deserve a closer look further down the road of my literary journey.
4/5
“…the only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.” Have this happened to you? 🤔
Photocredit: @chandradyani_
For more excellent books, check out my Reading Lists.
