sean

“What is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance,” writes the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “rather than the quality of experience.” But what if we don’t want to become virtuoso musicians or renowned artists? What if we only want to dabble in these things, to see if they might subtly change our outlook on the world or even, as we try to learn them, change us? What if we just want to enjoy them?”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

“I have no hobby. As far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies—preoccupations in which I had become mindlessly infatuated in order to kill the time—had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry

“Everything must be for something. I tell someone I'm going on an eighty-mile bike ride, and they ask, "What are you training for?" I want to answer, "I don't know... life?" "What is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance," write the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "rather than the quality of experience."

But what if we don't want to become virtuoso musicians or renowned artists? What if we only want to dabble in these things, to see if they might subtly change our outlook on the world or even, as we try to learn them, change us? What if we just want to enjoy them?

The idea of undertaking new pursuits, ones that you may never be very good at, seems perverse in this age of single-minded peak performance.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune