Simple yet excellent. Lateral Action presents 8 Fight Club quotes everyone (not just ‘creators’) should live by.
At its core, Fight Club is about living the life you truly want to live, and the hard path to getting there. Tyler helps the story’s nameless hero (usually referred to as Jack) down that path to enlightenment, so maybe what Tyler says can help the rest of us as well.
- “No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”
- Again: “No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”
- “I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let’s evolve, let the chips fall where they may.”
- “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”
- “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.”
- “People do it everyday, they talk to themselves… they see themselves as they’d like to be, they don’t have the courage you have, to just run with it.”
- “Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.”
- “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.”
This month’s British Journal of Psychiatry has an interesting essay on ‘moral pharmacology’. Mind Hacks picks up the story:
[Sean Spence] argues that while most attention has been focused on ’smart drugs’ and cognitive enhancement, medication is already being subtly used to improve ethical behaviour and we should prepare for a revolution in ‘moral pharmacology’.
[…]
Recent considerations of the ethics of cognitive enhancement have specifically excluded consideration of social cognitions (such as empathy, revenge or deception), on the grounds that they are less amenable to quantification. Nevertheless, it would be regrettable if this limitation entirely precluded consideration of what must be an important question for humanity: can pharmacology help us enhance human morality? Might drugs not only make us smarter but also assist us in becoming more ‘humane’?
New York Times science journalist, Natalie Angier, tackles the question of how various animals deal with death.
Among the social insects, the need for prompt corpse management is considered so pressing that there are dedicated undertakers, workers that within a few minutes of a death will pick up the body and hoist or fly it outside, to a safe distance from hive or nest, the better to protect against possible contagious disease. Honeybees are such compulsive housekeepers that if a mouse or other large creature, drawn by the warmth or promise of honey, happens to make its way into the hive and die inside, the bees, unable to bodily remove it, will embalm it in resin collected from trees. “You can find mummified mice inside beehives that are completely preserved right down to their whiskers,” said Gene E. Robinson, professor of entomology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Advice on choosing between two difficult choices, from Overcoming Bias.
Well… if you can’t decide between them, they must be around equally appealing, right? Equally balanced pros and cons? So the choice must matter very little - you may as well flip a coin. The alternative is that the pros and cons aren’t equally balanced, in which case the decision should be simple.
This is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, obviously - more appropriate for choosing from a restaurant menu than choosing a major in college.
This is the principal quote:
I do think there’s something to be said for agonizing over important decisions, but only so long as the agonization process is currently going somewhere, not stuck.
Scott Adams—the author famous for his Dilbert comic—has an interesting take on ambition:
I think ambition is a genetic defect. You can’t have ambition unless you think there is something wrong with the way you are. Ambition is a state of feeling perpetually flawed.