The Fat Man Today

As a writer, I make it a point that I read and read and read some more , because the only way any self-respecting writer would improve in his craft is to amass as much experience and information as he can, which, of course, is a rather difficult endeavor (given the restrictions of time and money, among other viable resources). There's also the question of knowing what to read. Which is an important question, because while everything readable is always a valuable resource depending on the person, not all books are actually conducive for writerly inspiration. You could spend hours and hours going through books like The Name of the Rose or Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and you wouldn't come up with anything inspiring. Those are two awesome books, don't get me wrong, but they're both two rather difficult books - and when books get difficult, they tend to render you useless for the next couple of days (at least, in my experience). Just recently, I came across, t...

Completion is such a big thing for everybody these days. There's a misconception that people who're truly happy can't be incomplete, since the lack of something important within the wholeness of the self can't constitute to being happy. People are likening happiness to stew. You can't get a good stew going without a good base. Now, I've never been the happiest man alive. In fact, when it comes to the level of happiness anybody can have, I'm probably the dude who's sitting in the aisle, trying to figure out what question number fifteen was about. But there's one thing I've learned about being happy, and that's people are never happy by default. Not with everything we have to put up with. People and things can make us happy for the time being, but in the end, the way we think and figure things out for ourselves is what's important. So yeah; in a way, the only people responsible for our happiness is ourselves. Which isn't a very comfo...

This article more or less sums up what I feel about today's increasingly fast-paced lifestyle. Like I said previously, I stumble upon a whole gamut of miscellaneous information at work, and sometimes, I end up hitting pay dirt; this find happens to be one of the more deep-seated, interesting jewels I managed to pan from the quagmire of the 'net. I like how he compares present to past habits, and puts in a logical reason for the dramatic shifts in lifestyle. The ironic thing is that the same thing that's pushing the body more and more into workaholism is the same thing that everybody's working for in the first place. A huge chunk of what today's economy is made up of relies heavily on the manufacture and sale of cutting-edge technology, which admittedly makes our lives an eternity easier (can you imagine living with the old-school video cassettes rather than having your very own mp3 player? mon dieu!). But what everybody seems to fail to grasp is the reality that th...