Nothing else matters, people.
The guy who figures in most of the books in your office is smashing the false button
If I am asked what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account.
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Yeah I think so. For 7 years I worked in a place that didn’t even feel like going to work. It felt like going to hang out with your friends and build cool shit. I quit in 2017 and I’ve still hung out with them a dozen times since.
One coworker who was extremely manic depressive, but hid it well so only a couple people knew, committed suicide. 70 people from our office went to his funeral. Another guy got married to a girl who worked there and there were more people from our office at his wedding than not. I met the first serious girlfriend I’d had in 20 years there.
It was a very unique situation but we basically had a village built on mutual love and respect - one that could absorb and celebrate all manner of characters, and even appreciate grumpy guys like me.
Btw I attribute this more than anything to half the people there being from South India. The culture reminds of me Latin America in being very warm and family-oriented. My second day on the job they had a potluck of amazing Indian food that featured one covered dish for every 3 people in the office. They built a family out of that office.
After that base, it was about as diverse as you could get. I’ve worked with all white dudes at startups/small consultancies, and I’ve worked with extremely diverse groups in more corporate settings. Not even remotely close - diversity is just objectively better.
I think was plenty good enough if it had continued until I die. But it didn’t, so I’m searching elsewhere for fulfillment.
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I’m a bit of a recluse.
It’s weird. I can walk into a home for a job and be gregarious with a family of 5 all sprawled out in the living room. But other conventional relationships, apart from my immediate family, are pretty nonexistent.
That’s why I’m often here for the social imitation.
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What do you guys think of Cornel West? lol
I think he was the inspiration for that In Living Color sketch
For short times, at jobs, and in graduate school, I had similar experiences. It was great. In one case I was making good money, in the others I lost my financial ass but didn’t care. I wish for nothing more than to be able to find that again.
I have a friend in a hospital ICU right now. He started his own business with a partner 30 years ago. After they’d started growing, the spouse of one of their employees got catastrophically sick, and their insurance rates went up. Some people complained so they had a meeting where he explained they were all in it together and if anyone didn’t like it they could gtfo. Lol contradictory but the message got across. Now it’s his turn in the insurance meat grinder. I’ve been there most days for over a month now and people keep streaming in to share their experiences with him. Every night, someone is bringing the family dinner or offering to care for dogs, plow snow, winterize vehicles, or other help. Or, just coming to trade some joking insult with him, even though he can’t talk and the only response might be a middle finger. Just being there to keep company with my old friend and his family really feels like the most meaningful thing I’ve done in years.
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Like Latin America and also like many parts of Africa and the Caribbean, suporting my long held belief that people from poorer countries are on the whole so much nicer to each other than their rich country equivalents where greed and the cult of the individual have corrupted socieities.
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Jodorowsky fan?
I assumed it was a homonym of Apollinaire. Never heard of Jodorowsky.
Never heard of him, probably a better bet.
Mainly because poets/artists who die/disappear tragically young have a strong hold on young creative minds.
Jodorowsky evens
Apollinaire 2/1
3/1 book
Original
and the one most people(?) think of
RIP Mr Burgie.
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Yes, Apollinaire. She’s a fan. She’s very into poetry and all things French.
She should make a pilgrimage to Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre where he used to hang out in appalling poverty with his best mate Picasso and the others, then hop over Eastwards (a short trip by US standards) to Charlesville and the Rimbaud museum if that’s her thing (I did a detour there of a few hours once from Brussels and found it illuminating).
If she ever meets her beau (see what I did there?) in London a trip to Royal College St in Camden to see where Rimbaud and Verlaine lived a riotous existence for a few months in also good.
But then I am (or used to be) something of a dead artist junky.
She’s been to Bateau-Lavoir. Has not been to the Rimbeau museum. She’s very briefly been to London and says she hardly did anything there. She did spend some time in Brighton and really liked it.
There are two micro-daughters. The author we’ve been talking about is my 20yo. The younger micro-daughter is 17 and she’s the one with the English virtual BF. She is planning to go to England next summer. He lives up near Liverpool.
My buddy was really into The Situationists - which I guess were based in France. Now he’s a Trumpfan. :(
They were a very interesting bunch…the society of the spectacle…and were a huge influence on the emergence of punk rock in 76, though probably too esoteric and hard to define to ever gain a mass following.
From “under the pavement, the beach” to Trump seems like a huge moral and political collapse.