Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.

Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.

nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation for Weak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected. Manifests itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one’s home universe, or as a longing for versions of one’s self that one will never, and can never know.

Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire.

What is this called, what I am doing, to myself, to my life, this wallowing, this pondering, this rolling over and over in the same places of my memory, wearing them thin, wearing them out? Why don't I ever learn? Why don't I ever do anything different?

Sometimes at night I worry about TAMMY. I worry that she might get tired of it all. Tired of running at sixty-six terahertz, tired of all those processing cycles, every second of every hour of every day. I worry that one of these cycles she might just halt her own subroutine and commit software suicide. And then I would have to do an error report, and I don't know how I would even begin to explain that to Microsoft.

How do you convince someone to change, to stop being afraid of himself? How do you convince yourself not to be so scared all the time?