You want to know what I really learned? I learned that people don’t consider time alone as part of their life. Being alone is just a stretch of isolation they want to escape from. I saw a lot of wine-drinking, a lot of compulsive drug use, a lot of sleeping with the television on. It was less festive than I anticipated. My view had always been that I was my most alive when I was totally alone, because that was the only time I could live without fear of how my actions were being scrutinized and interpreted. What I came to realize is that people need their actions to be scrutinized and interpreted in order to feel like what they’re doing matters. Singular, solitary moments are like television pilots that never get aired. They don’t count. This, I think, explains the fundamental urge to get married and have kids[…]. We’re self-conditioned to require an audience, even if we’re not doing anything valuable or interesting. I’m sure this started in the 1970s. I know it did. I think Americans started raising offspring with this implicit notion that they had to tell their children, “You’re amazing, you can do anything you want, you’re a special person.” [...] But—when you really think about it—that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don’t have ways to quantify ideas like “amazing” or “successful” or “lovable” without the feedback of an audience. Nobody sits by himself in an empty room and thinks, “I’m amazing.” It’s impossible to imagine how that would work. But being “amazing” is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spend by themselves become these meaningless experiences that don’t really count. It’s filler.
Chuck KlostermanTags: social loneliness human-nature alone sociology aloneness
Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum.
Chuck KlostermanTags: perspective appreciation
Fake love is a very powerful thing.
Chuck KlostermanTags: love
We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.
Chuck KlostermanTags: wisdom thought understanding complexity
The desire to be cool is—ultimately—the desire to be rescued.
Chuck KlostermanTags: acceptance self-esteem cool
The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.
Chuck KlostermanTags: music country-music
But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you’re
sharing a reality that doesn’t exist.
There are very few Americans who honestly care who Lindsay Lohan is dating. But it’s still information they need to have. This is because those people care about something else entirely; they’re worried about the possibility of everyone else understanding something that they’re missing.
Chuck KlostermanThe year you spent ‘killing yourself’
to make me love you…I thought that was us being best friends. We had all those intimate conversations and you sent me all those long e-mails and we watched all those movies involving Eric
Stoltz—I thought that was us having fun. But you see that kind of behavior as the work you’re forced to do in order to sleep with the people you want to sleep with.
I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.
Chuck KlostermanTags: black strangers hat care abstractions when chuck the wear i about klosterman they-re
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