the art of boredom: Archive

“In a community where everyone asks about what you do and no one asks about what you love, it’s easy to become discouraged and uninspired. Many of us cease to think of ourselves as “artists” as our minds and our days are consumed with the tedium of the jobs we take on to afford living in New York. So what’s the point?”—I Am Not My Job: Why I Left New York City | (via thatkindofwoman)

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“The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? And if he does quit him, is it in order to lead a free existence, in which he will have no master but himself? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forced him to sell himself to the first employer. Thus the worker’s liberty, so much exalted by the economists, jurists, and bourgeois republicans, is only a theoretical freedom, lacking any means for its possible realization, and consequently it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom -voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory in the economic sense - broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery.”—Mikhail Bakunin, who died 1st July 1876 (via class-struggle-anarchism)

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“In a community where everyone asks about what you do and no one asks about what you love, it’s easy to become discouraged and uninspired. Many of us cease to think of ourselves as “artists” as our minds and our days are consumed with the tedium of the jobs we take on to afford living in New York. So what’s the point?”—I Am Not My Job: Why I Left New York City | (via sisterwife)

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“We have only one movie, and remember only one sad tale. If our history leads us to the First World War, then we imagine that we were always bound on that collision course, and we cannot imagine that, with a bit of luck and another set of contingencies, we might have been on the Olympic, not the Titanic. We search for parallels of disaster, and miss parallels of hope.”—

Adam Gopnik reflects on the contrasting fates of the Titanic and the Olympic, as a lens to contemplate the coming year: http://nyr.kr/1eMTsPs

(via newyorker)

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“Nothing, nothing was there anymore, leaving me like a suit of armor with no knight inside. It took a long time before I even felt alarmed.”—Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless (via pro-solitude)

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so the older i get, the more hysterical i find my teenage plans to have children before i turned thirty because hA HA HA HA i can barely take care of myself are you kidding me so ANYWAY what were your childhood "when i'm an adult i'll do x!" things that you are now re-adjusting? (is this a depressing question? IDK, i have conversations like this literally all the time LADIES AM I RITE)

I woke up on my 16th birthday sorely disappointed, and ever since then, I’ve slowly abandoned the idea of a timeline. I’ll get to that in a second.

Hard deadlines just don’t work for me anymore because the things that I want are more fluid. When I was younger, we all measured our lives in landmarks: teenager at 13, driver’s license, high school graduation, legal to drink, college graduation. When that structure was taken away, when being 25 was greeted with “old enough to rent a car” and ended with “next up is becoming a senior citizen at 65,” it was no big concern. I had filled up the in-between with made-up landmarks. SNL by 26. Marriage by 27. First kid by 29. Queendom of Great Eyebrows by 32. I knew “30” was the time where you were supposed to accomplish a lot of shit. But I also knew that “kids and spiritual enlightenment and a complete kitchen” ain’t happening. Maybe a clean closet. Dat’s about all she wrote.

Here’s the thing, though: You fucking die and you don’t know when you will. So each and every day, you shouldn’t be focusing on “when I’m this age I’ll be this” because you don’t know. You SHOULD know that you are here and you deserve to be happy.

The happiness I desire and the goals I want to obtain aren’t “hard dates,” because achieving them will last a lifetime. I want to be happy with my body. I want to help women. I want to feel content. I want to raise a family. I want to be financially secure one day to own a house. These have become more important than the idea of reaching them by a certain date. These have become the true foundation of my life, essentials I must begin to strive towards every day, but with more of the “cool professor who just wants you to do well in college” loose deadline kind of shit.

Granted, there are still difficult but tangible goals I want to accomplish before I die: I want to write a best-selling YA book. I want to have really sexy auburn hair. I want to duet “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” with Jimmy Fallon and I want to have a legit reason to wear a gown to an event. Some of these goals I might never achieve. Some goals will change. If I DO achieve one of these goals before I die, I still want to die just as happy as I would if I hadn’t. I’m sure you have goals like this too. Remember these. Let them be not the driving force to your life, but the delicious vanilla-scented air freshener in your ride.

There is no “by 30” for me. There is only the want for the climb and the endpoint being happiness. There IS only “be happy.” This took me a while to figure out, only because losing those hard deadlines made me staunchly aware I was an adult, and the only goals you make for yourself are self-made and that shit is hard to wrap your head around. And yes, I began to learn this lesson at 16, when I didn’t wake up floating above my bed like Sabrina.

But mark my words, I’ll be a teenage witch someday. Before OR after 30.

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“The advent of the Internet and the ensuing social transformation has thus reconfigured the lifeworld we live in, specifically, the ways in which we connect with others. In this new environment, face-to-face interaction is only one of the many contact options individuals can choose from for “social relating.” Face-to- face relationships used to be the context within which all other forms of contact (e.g., postal and telephone contacts) were embedded. Typically, people came to know each other in face-to-face situations first and used mail and the telephone afterward to help maintain the relationships.

Now, this trajectory of acquaintanceship development can be entirely reversed. For example, it is possible for people to get to know each other first in online chat room, then move to e-mail exchange, to telephone contact, and, finally, to in-person meetings. In such cases, face-to-face interaction is the outcome rather than the basis of mediated communication. There are also instances in which social relationships are developed and maintained in total absence of corporeal copresence (e.g., the realm of consociated contemporaries). In other words, it is no longer true that the face-to-face situation is the “prototypical case of social interaction” and “all other cases are derivatives of it” (Berger and Luckmann 1966:28). Online communication, for example, can now become the basis upon which offline face-to-face contacts develop.

[…]In light of those changes, we must now update our theory of human interaction. It is no longer productive to stress the divide between face-to-face interaction and all other forms of human contact, pitting the former against the latter. In the Internet era, human interaction takes multiple forms, each serving a different purpose. Face-to-face interaction remains to be a fundamental way of relating to others, but this does not mean that mediated contacts are inferior or insignificant, for it is not face-to-face interaction alone but its combination with other forms of human contact that create the world in which we live today.”—Shanyang Zhao, ”The Internet and the Transformation of the Reality of Everyday Life” (via sociolab)

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