Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.

Music is one of those things that make us feel a little less alone in the world.

This quote emphasizes the importance of positive actions and moral strength in the fight against injustice.

Buzz Quotes

I've never felt like I was in the cookie business. I've always been in a feel good feeling business. My job is to sell joy. My job is to sell happiness. My job is to sell an experience.

Because no matter what you say in life, the truth will always be the truth. You know when someone is telling the truth, you look in the eyes. I have a tendency to believe people.

Modern life encourages us to atomize ourselves away from interdependence, toward feelings of self-reliance, toward the ability to buy or outsource or hire for anything we need, reassured that it will arrive at our door within 24 hours. All of this should feel like magic, and yet somehow it does not. The mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and social toll of abstracting domestic life away from collectives — whether genetic, geographic, cultural, or chosen — are not just well documented across studies and articles and op-eds; they are manifestly abundant in our daily lives. We seem to be doing life backward: We live alone and expend effort to gather together, as if that’s the healthy baseline; instead of starting with togetherness as the foundation, and striking out for aloneness when we need it.

Solitude is like winter: The best thing about it is that it has a timestamp. To intentionally seek out solitude, we also sign up for the promise of homecoming — the warmth of familiar, friendly context, people who generally know where you are, and how you are, without needing to expend much effort. One of the most underrated benefits of living together is the simple wellness check — “Is she alive, and generally of sound mind, heart, body?” — that people who live together perform on each other daily. It’s a continuous tune-up, socially underrated but spiritually essential.

In recent years I’ve learned how to be intentional about solitude. This helps me ward off loneliness. It’s ironic that one can solve for the other, but it’s true: Loneliness is an unintentional disconnect, solitude happens by choice.

Being alone opens all your senses up to your environment. Both your lungs and your feelings just sort of … get bigger. Being Alone is an opportunity to breathe in the luxury and thrill of your own undivided attention. Solitude offers the chance to have an encounter with yourself.

There isn’t exactly a name or space for this quality in our social script, either. One story of modern history is the story of people fleeing and shedding tedious or harmful relationships in increasingly more intimate layers. The freedom to do this is essential, as a baseline requirement for human wellbeing. But it’s as if in our launch toward individuation, we overshot. The narratives that powered our flight are still flinging us forward, and we can’t figure out how to get back to each other again.

But I suspect good solitude, the lifegiving kind, is only really possible when it emerges from the context of presence. Isolation and loneliness is a critical problem for Americans of all ages, exacerbated by the pandemic. But Covid-19 cut both ways: What was missing, for many who lived together, was the option to be alone; what was absent, for those who lived alone, was the option to return to each other