“Fame seems a very flimsy thing to die for. And where we find an idea that is both pervasive yet flimsy, it suggests that there is something deeper at work, some inescapable oddness – or error – in the way we see the world.” (aeon magazine)

moral character as the key to identity in aeon:

“I inquired what kind of change would render her unrecognisable. My friend responded without hesitation: ‘If she stopped being kind. I would leave her immediately.’ He considered the question a few moments more. ‘And I don’t mean, if she’s in a bad mood or going through a rough time. I’m saying if she turned into a permanent bitch with no explanation. Her soul would be different. This encounter is instructive for a few reasons (not least of which is the intriguing term ‘permanent bitch’) but let’s start with my friend’s invocation of the soul…”

your desire to be famous and the problems it will bring you in the philosophers’ mail

image: Warren Beatty on Madonna in Truth or Dare

“One of the reasons we admire or like art, if we do, is that it reopens us in some sense—as Kafka wrote in a letter, art breaks the sea that’s frozen inside us.”

Adam Phillips on psychoanalysis in The Paris Review

how do our travel choices reflect our own internal worlds? (the philosophers’ mail)

“Unfortunately, we generally don’t quite know where we need to go on our inner journey towards psychological evolution – and rush out to destinations that have been foisted on us by the travel industry or some accident of logistics. We say – somewhat casually – that we’d love to see a desert – but we’re often not clear why desert scenes ‘move’ us. Yet to be moved by an image of a destination is, in essence, to recognise a congruence between a place in the world and a destination on our inner map. There is something in the scene we see outside that our inner eye knows we need inside.

Getting ready for a journey should involve working out what the next stages on our inner journey should be – and then taking these rather unformed, destination-free needs to a travel agent in order to find places in the world that could support them. We might also sit with postcards of possible locations and ask ourselves, from a psychological point of view, the only question that matters: ‘What is there here that I might be craving inside?’”

why walter white was so important to understanding our own moral ambiguity:

“When Walter finally admits that he did it all — the meth, the money, the murders — because he liked it, because it made him feel alive, that vanity motivated him more than charity, it reflects how our own ostensible altruism is often just the lie we tell ourselves to excuse our dirtiest deeds.”

oliver burkeman describes the “what-the-hell effect” and how to indulge yourself without letting things get totally ridiculous in the guardian

“People often get a lot of pleasure from anticipating the future. The French even have a term for this phenomenon: se réjouir”: Happiness, money and imagination in New Republic

Film Still: Punch-Drunk Love, Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson (2002)

“We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We’re kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”

-Roger Ebert

Film Still: The Deer Hunter. Dir. Michael Cimino (1978)