“People die,”
“It’s going to happen over and over again. It’s the nature of what happens here. What makes you a rider is what you do after people die. You want to know why you’re still alive? Because you’re the scale I currently judge myself against every night. Every day I let you live, I get to convince myself that there’s still a part of me that’s a decent person. So if you want to quit, then please, spare me the temptation and fucking quit. But if you want to do something, then do it.”
Cicero said, "To philosophize is to prepare for death," and Seneca: "No man enjoys the true
taste of life but he who is willing and ready to quit it." Saint Augustine expressed the same idea: "It is only in the face of death that man's self is born."
Sayfa 30
“But here’s the thing, even if I quit my job and started taking the blog seriously again, went back to meeting all the Bucks and Litas and Mathildes of the world—it’s not going to make me happy. I needed those people, because I felt alone. I thought I had to run hundreds of miles away from here to find some place to belong. I spent my whole life thinking anyone outside my family who got too close, saw too much, wouldn’t want me anymore. The safest thing was those quick, serendipitous moments with strangers. That’s all I thought I could have. And then there was you. I love you so much that I’ve spent twelve years putting as much distance between us as I could. I moved. I traveled. I dated other people. I talked about Sarah all the fucking time because I knew you had a crush on her, and it felt safer that way. Because the last person I could take being rejected by was you. And now I know that. I know it’s not traveling that’s gonna get me out of this slump and it’s not a new job and it’s sure as hell not chance encounters with water taxi drivers. All of that, every minute of it, has been running away from you, and I don’t want to do that anymore. I love you, Alex Nilsen. Even if you don’t give me a real chance, I’m always going to love you. And I’m scared to move back to Linfield because I don’t know if I’d like it here, or if I’d be bored, or if I’d make any friends, and because I’m terrified to run into the people who made me feel like I didn’t matter and for them to decide they were right about me.”
Quot linguas quit callet, tot homines valet.
Bir insan ne kadar dil konuşabiliyorsa, o kadar insana bedeldir.
Fear once served as a mechanism that protected us. Nowadays, fear has turned into
our enemy and it rips us of our freedom. When most people run into a roadblock, they
quit.
"Behavioral economics is about understanding economic behavior and its consequences. It's about understanding why someone buys a hotdog, goes to work, saves for retirement, gives to charity, gets a qualification, sells an old car, gambles on a horse race, cannot quit smoking, etc. and could be helped to make better choices."
