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.
Texas will again lift it's head and stand among the nations. It ought to do so, for no country upon the globe can compare with it in natural advantages.
The vapour becomes snow, then water, then Ganga; but when it is vapour, there is no Ganga, and when it is water, we think of no vapour in it. The idea of creation or change is inseparably connected with will. So long as we perceive this world in motion, we have to conceive will behind it.
This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.
Ever man is eternally alone. But when you get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the acute symptoms of its disease - that of thinking.
We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God
Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual.
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