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History is full of people who just didnāt.Ā They saidĀ no thank you, turned away, ran away to the desert, stood on the streets in rags, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, walked barefoot through town, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light.Ā Even babies refuse, and the elderly, too.Ā All types of animals refuse: at the zoo they gaze dead-eyed through plexiglass, fling feces at the human faces, stop having babies. Classes refuse.Ā The poor throw their lives onto barricades. Workers slow the line. Enslaved people have always refused, poisoning the feasts, aborting the embryos. And the diligent, flamboyant jaywalkers assert themselves against traffic as the first and foremost visible, daily lesson inĀ just not.
its existence serves as a rec, no words are needed
Feb 12, 2024
Related Recs
Essay from Adam Phillips has me ready to quit stuff:
āThereā are at least three salient meanings of giving up that recur in different forms, all of them at the heart of Kafkaās preoccupations: defeatedness and sacrifice, or failure and compromise, or weakness and realism. The ambiguity of the phrase āgiving upā in English is instructive: to give up is always to give something up; something or someone is sacrificed. And sacrifice, whatever else it is, is a sadistic pleasure. To put it another way, perhaps we should not underestimate the pleasures of giving up, however forbidden or shameful they may seem to be. No one writes in praise of giving up, any more than people write in celebration of shame. The question I want to broach is not why do we give up, but why donāt we? Why are we less interested in having given up than avoiding giving up?ā
Mar 12, 2024
hear me outāthis one might feel impossible, but i quit purchasing items on Amazon in 2018 and cancelled my GoodReads account shortly after.
i did some serious reflection and realized iād become super reliant upon, and frankly, quite used to the instant gratification of purchasing something and knowing iād have it within a day. thatās not normal. the labor practices, economics, and environmental impacts of getting what you want from the internet delivered quickly and right to your door are skewed. i was filling a void in myself with mindless purchases.
iām aware that they service a huge swath of the internet (Amazon Web Services), own Whole Foods and Abe Books, and will likely take over more businesses we like and rely on. weaning off and avoiding entirely is very very hard, but it can also be a measured decision. that said, i know that it is a privilege to abstain from Amazon. i am able bodied, i donāt have kids, i have access to a car, i live in an urban environment with access to a lot of stuff at my fingertips. but making the choice to break out of the Amazon loop has ultimately been better for my pocketbook and better for my relationship to these mega-tech-companies that have their fingers in everything.
in contrast, iām becoming more interested in alternate economies, like bartering and sharing. i love the idea of having commonly shared tools and items (tool libraries are very cool). we donāt need to own it all, we have each other.
interested in exploring more? the zine pictured below is a great start, and summarizes a much larger book by the same author on how to resist the leviathan that is Amazon.
Jan 22, 2025
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i read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas recently on recommendation from a fantastic YouTuber named Shaun who has made many video essays from a leftist perspective criticizing right-wing ideology, thoroughly analyzing historic events using dialectical materialism, and recently put out an informative and heartfelt video about Palestine.
TOWWAFO is a short read (only five pages) but i have not been able to stop thinking about the questions it raises and the way it relates to being American in the modern age, with all the knowledge we have of the horrors of imperialism and American intervention in the name of capitalism. i highly recommend reading it and meditating on its implications.
āThe trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.ā - Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
Feb 29, 2024
Top Recs from @isa_gualt
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little fancy planners with excelent paper to write on, a kaweco sports filled with my summer-y ink and my beautiful blackwing pearl pencils, to use at work and at home
Feb 11, 2024
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it was so bad and soul sucking it will be really hard to top it off
Apr 27, 2024
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- fountain pens are clearly superior (the infinite inks! the ritual of cleaning them!), but i will settle for a uni jetstream in .5 (for ballpoints) or a uni signo in .038 (for gel)
- any nice pencil works, but my favorites are blackwing pearls (smooth and dark, but keeps the point) or any mitsubishi, with a nice pencil cap so you can throw in your bag in peace.
- for erasers: tombow mono or sakura foam. that's it.
- would try out which paper works better with what you choose, fountain pens are very inky and will be way better on soft smooth paper. i'am a tomoe river girl, but rhodia and several other brands do nice paper and you just have to touch to find out
Feb 12, 2024