When we live the 21st-century good life, almost every aspect of it is predicated on not looking at the implications of what we're up to. Happiness at this point has a lot to do with not looking, so you don't feel complicit in some vast and awful enterprise.
Interpretation
Happiness may stem from ignoring the unpleasant realities of our modern lives.
Paolo Bacigalupi's quote explores the notion that contemporary happiness is often based on willful ignorance of the moral and ethical implications of our lifestyles. In the pursuit of what is often called the 'good life,' individuals may choose to overlook the broader consequences of their actions, thereby finding temporary joy while remaining unaware of their complicity in larger societal issues.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about consumer culture and environmental responsibility.
All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you're writing science fiction, you're writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it's inequity where The Man must be fought.
Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.
Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain, expect, etc. language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement
You cannot dictate what people find funny, what people find attractive, or what people find scary. There is not a norm.
I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.
We're all assigned a piece of the garden, a corner of the universe that is ours to transform. Our corner of the universe is our own life - our relationships, our homes, our work, our current circumstances -. exactly as they are. Every situation we find ourselves in is an opportunity, perfectly planned by the Holy Spirit, to teach love instead of fear.
We can suspend disbelief about Harry Potter, and we do the same thing with God, and we do the same thing with human rights, and we do the same thing with money.
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