On Being Yourself

“Being yourself” is rarely the solution and often the problem, especially if you suck. “The future,” Aaron Haspel wagers, “will marvel that we regarded ‘be yourself’ as sound moral advice.”

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John Faithful Hamer
The Dark Side of Fake It Till You Make It

“Fake it till you make it” usually means, in practice, “fake it till I believe you”. In other words, become a really good actor. If you can convince me, perhaps you can convince yourself; and if you can’t, well, it’s all the same to me, so long as you put on a good show.

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John Faithful Hamer
Distant Regard: A Selection from Tony Hoagland’s Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (2018)

“If I knew I would be dead by this time next year I believe I would spend the months from now till then writing thank-you notes to strangers and acquaintances, telling them, ‘You really were a great travel agent.’ Or ‘I never got the taste of your kisses out of my mouth.’ Or ‘Watching you walk across the room was part of my destination.’”—Tony Hoagland

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The Writer as Sock Puppet: A Selection from Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions (2022)

“There will, of course, be protest movements, and artists and writers will be urged to join them. It will be their moral duty—or so they will be told—to lend their voices to the cause. . . . But it’s tricky telling creative people what to create or demanding that their art serve a high-minded agenda crafted by others. Those among them who follow such hortatory instructions are likely to produce mere propaganda or two-dimensional allegory—tedious sermonizing either way. The art galleries of the mediocre are wallpapered with good intentions.”—Margaret Atwood

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Am I a Bad Feminist?: A Selection from Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions (2022)

“I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women, there have to be civil and human rights, period, including the right to fundamental justice, just as for women to have the vote, there has to be a vote. Do Good Feminists believe that only women should have such rights? Surely not. That would be to flip the coin on the old state of affairs in which only men had such rights.”—Margaret Atwood

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Cosmic Insignificance Therapy: A Selection from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks (2021)

“What you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less. . . . Your own life will have been a minuscule little flicker of near-nothingness in the scheme of things: the merest pinpoint, with two incomprehensibly vast tracts of time, the past and future of the cosmos as a whole, stretching off into the distance on either side.”—Oliver Burkeman

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