The good life

Ecological sustainability, self-sufficiency, community building, everyday wisdom

Toothache
For those who don't experience it every day, it is hard to imagine how it can affect one's life: tooth pain. I arrived in Europe half a year ago with tooth pain, and despite several visits to the dentist, I am still suffering. I have chronic tooth pain, for more than five years now. I have only one wish ...
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The good life
“Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from ...
A country is a story to structure collective pride.
If you see a concrete block of 1000 kg you don't try to lift it up. It would be silly or even dangerous to try. Who knows their mental equivalent of that 1000 kg concrete block?
Talent
Your "talent" is not some magical force you can tap into, it has always been built up over time. You did that. Every talent you have, you have accumulated and that process started when you were conceived, in your mother's womb. "I don't have talent" is never an excuse. It is never too late to start building talent. Make the world your womb. Stay hard.
"What is the purpose of life?" "Mainly gloating over the misfortunes of others" "And you say evil comes from religion, huh?" "...And then there's irony." Christopher Hitchens
In the end, we are all big-brained monkeys with a limited capacity.
Is literary writing the art of making cultivated loneliness feel like engaging conversation?
"A value debased and an illusion unmasked have the same pitiful form; they resemble each other and there is nothing easier than to mistake one for the other." From: The Joke by Milan Kundera
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
Feminism
She who entirely accepts the fact that one man stays at home shows more signs of feminism than she who loudly proclaims that all women have to go to work.
Adorno on Facebook
The notion that every single person considers themselves better in their particular interest than all others, is as long-standing a piece of bourgeois ideology as the overestimation of others as higher than oneself, just because they are the community of all customers. [The source of "likes"] Since the old bourgeois class has abdicated, both lead their afterlife in the Spirit [Geist] of intellectuals, who are at the same time the last enemies of the bourgeois, and the last bourgeois. By allowing themselves to still think at all vis-a-vis the naked reproduction of existence, they behave as the privileged; by leaving things in thought, they declare the nullity of their privilege. - Theodor W. Adorno, quoted by Babette Babich