421Life is fucking confusing. I don’t know anything, and neither do you.

But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don’t have ways to quantify ideas like “amazing” or “successful” or “lovable” without the feedback of an...

The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There...

It’s far easier to write why something is terrible than why it’s good. If you’re reviewing a film and you decide “This is a movie I don’t like,” basically you can take every element of...

Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they’re honest about everything.

We are losing the ability to understand anything that’s even vaguely complex.

Life is fucking confusing. I don’t know anything, and neither do you.

Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy.

Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It’s so formulaic and unsurprising that you...

Within these strangely specific conditions, everything is perfect. We are perfect.

But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a...

Sarcasm is when you tell someone the truth by lying on purpose.

[On political correctness:] Any intended message mattered less than the received message, and every received message could be interpreted in whatever way the receiver wanted.

Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.

I found him completely dishonest and totally likable, because he doesn’t care.

Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.

Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable. Unfortunately, the average man is less adroit at fostering such rivalries, which is why most men remain average; males are better at hating things that...

If you’ve spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you’ve probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this!...

…because people who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation. It’s a way for people to be honest without telling the truth.

And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess...

Hitler is the human catch-all for all other terrible humans.

Some say that time is like water that flows around us (like a stone in the river) and some say we flow with time (like a twig floating on the surface of the water).

Do you know people who insist they like ‘all kinds of music’? That actually means they like no kinds of music.

Presidents lie all the time. Really great presidents lie. Abraham Lincoln managed to end slavery in America partially by deception. (In an 1858 debate, he flatly insisted that he had no intention of abolishing slavery...

I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything...

F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that’s not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion....

As recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn’t own a TV. But nobody thinks like that anymore. Today, claiming you don’t own a TV simply means...

…his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.

There are two ways to look at life. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone’s life is entropy. The...

The desire to be cool is—ultimately—the desire to be rescued.

I love the way music inside a car makes you feel invisible; if you plan the stereo at max volume, it’s almost like the other people can’t see into your vehicle. It tints your windows,...

Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from...

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop...

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our...

If rain is God crying, I think God is drunk and his girlfriend just slept with Zeus.

We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it’s too weird to imagine people who aren’t casually lying, pretty much all the time.

If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always...

This made her remember why people take up walking: It is because they no longer have anywhere to go.

…I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as “the sport of the future” since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never...

The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no ‘normal’ because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.

I suppose we’ll never know what really happened in that room, though he did tell police, “I did it because I’m a dirty dog.” This is not a very convincing alibi. He may as well...

amazing” is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spend by themselves become these meaningless experiences that don’t really count. It’s filler.

Contrary to what you may have heard from Henry Rollins or/and Ian MacKaye and/or anyone else who joined a band after working in an ice cream shop, you can’t really learn much about a person...

I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they’re all so envious of it.

Perhaps we humans are still in command, and perhaps there really will be a conventional robot war in the not-so-distant future. If so, let’s roll. I’m ready. My toaster will never be the boss of...

I care about strangers when they’re abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they’re literally in front of me.

But I still feel like I lost.We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It’s easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in the...

I also need to prepare myself for the inevitability of utter boredom: Very often, single people don’t do shit. They do nothing, all night long. They sit in a recliner and watch TV. I’ve probably...

If you play “I Don’t Want To Know” by Fleetwood Mac loud enough — you can hear Lindsey Buckingham’s fingers sliding down the strings of his acoustic guitar. …And we were convinced that this was...

…he was forty bushels beyond bamboozled.