God honors his favorites by crushing them, drops the whole insufferable wretched weight of purpose on their spines until they either snap into shape or snap entirely. the unburdened, those buoyant grinning vapid little phantoms drifting through their own lives without a single crushing thing to carry, they are forgotten
A reminder from Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
Most people are dead long before they die. They walk around serious, working serious, eating serious, and one day they actually die, and nobody can tell the difference.
I tell you a different way. The way of the child.
You were a child once. You have forgotten. The child does not work, the child plays. The child can stare at an ant for an hour and find a universe in it, and your professor cannot find a universe in his whole library, because the child has not yet been told what is important. The moment you were told what is important, you stopped seeing what is real. Forget what you were told. Look at the ant again.
Then comes play. This is where the strict priests will burn me. They want your spiritual life to be heavy, dark, serious, with long faces and folded hands. I say a real life is like a child who has fallen in love with the world. Light. Laughing. Dancing. You have been figuring everything your whole life and it has brought you nowhere, drop the figuring and the laughter comes by itself.
Drop the seriousness. Drop the performance. Get curious about ordinary things like you used to. And then play with whatever is in front of you, the way you used to play with everything, before they trained you out of being alive.
Fight Club (1999) was filmed largely in chronological order. Edward Norton adopted a near-starvation diet and avoided the sun, while Brad Pitt trained and used tanning salons, so Tyler Durden grows stronger as the narrator withers.
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
— Charles Bukowski