Trying to be perfect may be sort of inevitable for people like us, who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and in its good opinion. But at one level it's too hard, and at another, it's too cheap and easy. Because it really requires you mainly to read the zeitgeist of wherever and whenever you happen to be, and to assume the masks necessary to be the best of whatever the zeitgeist dictates or requires. Those requirements shapeshift, sure, but when you're clever you can read them and do the imitation required.
Infinite players, in contrast, look to the future. Because their goal is to keep the game going, they focus less on what happened, and put more effort into figuring out what’s possible. By playing a single, non-repeatable game, they are unconcerned with the maintenance and display of past status. They are more concerned with positioning themselves to deal effectively with whatever challenges come up.
What is it about the desk that allows such personal glimpses into anonymous souls? Is it because when faced with that outrageous sky, the sotol and prickly pear and grassland far below, people inherently turn to thinking about the vast questions in their own lives? Whatever it is, what happens in those notebooks feels important and authentic. “The candor of the journals encouraged me to think more deeply about what I felt and cared about,” says Alpine resident Pam Gaddis, a longtime visitor to the hill. “In a sense, we are all writing for each other, all voicing our piece of the human experience.”
But we are now discovering that some arachnids possess hidden cognitive abilities rivalling those of mammals and birds, including foresight and planning, complex learning and even the capacity to be surprised. Stranger still, the delicate silk threads they spin out behind them, so easily swept up by a feather duster, help them to sense and remember their world. Indeed, spiders’ silk is so important to their cognitive abilities that some scientists believe it should be considered part of their mind.
If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.
If the lures of Crusoe’s ambition were great, the lures of ambition in our own day are greater still. Crusoe’s ambition could be kindled only by stories. Our own ambitions are stoked by billboards, screens, and Facebook feeds. Never before have their objects seemed so vivid, so close.
A person who was born blind doesn't have the visual inputs to help shape their model of the world. They have to build it with their other senses—a model of the world that Pollak and Corlett argue could be more stable.
Instead, focus on extreme ideas that may be adopted by unusual consumers and then make their way into the mainstream.
In fact, reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, owing to impatience, distraction, inexperience with the product’s “instructions for use,” and inexperience in life itself.
First, they note that, like other forms of indirect rationing, rationing through inconvenience preserves patient choice.