Anthony Bourdain had what looked like the best job on the planet. He got paid to roam the world eating whatever he wanted, and strangers everywhere told him things they would never tell a reporter. Eight years ago today, he died by suicide at 61.
For almost thirty years before any of that, he was a cook nobody had heard of, working long hot shifts for little money. He was in his forties when he wrote a book spilling the secrets of what really goes on behind restaurant doors, and almost overnight, the unknown cook became a star.
What made him different was that he never faked it. Other travel hosts smiled at pretty views and pretended to love everything. Bourdain sat on plastic stools in back alleys and ate exactly what the people there ate. Then he got them talking about their real lives, and they trusted him enough to tell him the truth.
He went to places most shows stayed away from, like the Congo, Gaza, Iran, and New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina. He once ate noodles at a tiny plastic-table joint in Vietnam with a sitting US president. His show Parts Unknown ran for twelve seasons and won a dozen Emmy Awards along with a Peabody, the top prize in broadcasting. It made a food show feel like real reporting on the world.
His death was so shocking because of the gap between the life everyone saw and the life he was actually living. Here was the guy who looked freer than anyone on TV, doing the job millions of people dreamed about, and the pain underneath was almost invisible to the people around him. He had actually talked about it in the open: on camera he once described how something as small as a bad meal could drop him into days of feeling low, and he had written about his heroin addiction from when he was young. None of it fit the cheerful, curious man people thought they knew.
He died just days after the designer Kate Spade died the same way, and that week, calls to the national crisis line jumped 65 percent. The conversation that followed kept circling one hard fact: the life you envy from the outside can be sitting right on top of pain you cannot see. What he left behind is bigger than any of the awards. He taught a whole generation that the fastest way to understand a stranger is to sit down and eat what they eat.
The anti-alcohol, anti-pleasure, live-off-grid rhetoric is anti-Western culture actually. We shouldn’t aspire to live like the Amish. We should aspire to enjoy the splendour of our civilisation: beautiful architecture, candlelit dinners, intellectual conversation, cocktails with beautiful friends under chandeliers. We didn’t build all this just to retreat back into huts and eat ground meat off wooden chopping boards
young couples trying to raise a family in our clown economy are admirable bordering on heroic, so if you have kids, its actually a patriotic duty to invade spaces where boomers, "childfree" redditors, disney adults, other sorts of foul beasts, cavort and stuff their putrid jowls
@CollapseAnime Stupid commies try to understand economics challenge (impossible).
The price change of this house is ~7.5% per year, which barely outpaces relative covid inflation and money supply growth in the same period
Shout out to the boomer in the aisle seat who asked me to put the shade down so he could sleep. Yeah man I paid extra for this seat to be of better service to your sleep schedule and not to be among the few humans in history to behold the wonders of our earth from the skies.
I will never understand how someone in a window seat on a plane would rather have the shade covered. People have lived and died for 10,000 years dreaming of this view and you’d rather watch Netflix in the dark.
I fucking hate Alex Karp man. If there's gonna be a shadowy military surveillance company can they at least do it directly and with professionalism. Stop bringing out this insufferable Taika Waititi character to talk about jiu jitsu and how it's woke elitism to oppose AI drones.
He’s right. In the US wagons work as a reverse status symbol. You buy a wagon to signal that you’re different, you’re not like the crowd who buys an SUV. I don’t think Chinese culture really conceptualizes the idea of individuality as a contrarian status indicator.
Pretty cool we get to speedrun the collapse of the American Empire because American voters elected a fat megalomaniacal salesman twice in retaliation for Amazon casting too many black elves in their Lord of the Rings prequel.
The bar is so incredibly low. If you can muster even the faintest modicum of agency every day for just a few years, you will easily propel yourself into the top decile for your age on every dimension that matters.