People at the extremes are happier than political moderates. Correcting for income, education, age, race, family situation and religion, the happiest Americans are those who say they are either “extremely conservative” (48 percent very happy) or “extremely liberal” (35 percent). Everyone else is less happy, with the nadir at dead-center “moderate” (26 percent).
On the other hand, if I had chosen to support the HHS mandate, or at least declined to protest it, which was a position I considered very seriously, I would be “out to destroy American Christianity” and an “enemy of religious freedom.”
It’s comforting, no doubt, to think that everyone who disagrees with you does so either out of intellectual deficiency or mendacity; as long as you convince yourself of that you can believe that there are no really difficult questions and that every problem has an ideal solution. Those particular illusions are dear to most people, and anyone who disrupts them gets punished. Moreover (I theorize) the moderate who disagrees with you is more troublesome than the person at the opposite extreme, since that moderate has probably agreed with you about some issues in the past and has therefore appeared to be a rational person, so the current disagreement seems like a betrayal, and one of the worst kinds of betrayal: the cruel revelation that the world is more complicated than you thought it was. This, I think, is why the people I follow on Twitter hate David Brooks more than any other columnist (and in many cases “hate” is not too strong a word): whoever they are, they’ve probably seen him be right about some things, so when he’s wrong it’s just insufferable. It disrupts the pigeonholes.
I wonder if moderates were as unhappy before they had to deal with the blast-furnaces of internet hatred? I’d like to think that there were Good Old Days when moderate or ideologically variable positions were received with more good will, or at least polite silence. That probably isn’t true, but at least back in the day contempt didn’t come furnished with a digital megaphone.
Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.
‘Bilbo knew no more than he told you, I am sure,’ said Gandalf. ‘He would certainly never have passed on to you anything that he thought would be a danger, even though I promised to look after you. He thought the ring was very beautiful, and very useful at need; and if anything was wrong or queer, it was himself. He said that it was “growing on his mind”, and he was always worrying about it; but he did not suspect that the ring itself was to blame. Though he had found out that the thing needed looking after; it did not seem always of the same size or weight; it shrank or expanded in an odd way, and might suddenly slip off a finger where it had been tight.’
Our online experience (and this is particularly true for specific ones, such as gaming or digital photography) seems to proceed in four stages. The first is tentative exploration, testing the waters; the second is wholehearted immersion; the third is a determination to maintain boundaries; the fourth is recalibration of the relationship between what happens online and what happens IRL – as we still like to put it. This has been happening to millions of people for around twenty years now, and what’s most remarkable is how little progress we have made in understanding ourselves.
Elizabeth Anscombe, for no reason except that I love this photo and think that she’s one of the most fascinating people of the 20th century.
I’m pretty sure this is where Dasein goes when he’s feeling down.
The latest Colorado shooter – like Jared Loughner of Tucson, Seung-Hui Cho of Virginia Tech, and the countless others whose names we forget after they have done their damage – could not legally have walked onto an airplane carrying a water bottle, or without taking off his shoes.But he could walk down the street with a legally purchased assault rifle, body armor, and as much ammo as he could lift.