Dear Lana,

Sometimes, I feel ashamed for wanting things. When you want things, you are reminded by what you don’t have. Schopenhauer probably say that it’s bad to have these natural desires, and Nietzsche would probably say to embrace them. What is more human, wanting or not wanting? More accurately, not wanting is just want of not wanting. It seems impossible to escape the spectrum of wanting, so it might be better off to embrace it instead, even though that might lead to unhappiness. Human existence is pretty unhappy. Why bother with anything else?

Marx kept on going off on how horrible being alienated from your labor is. I disagree; I think it’s pretty great. Who actually wants ownership in what they create? It seems like so much… accountability. Who wants accountability? That’s so much… counting.

I realized that if you don’t particularly believe in anything, not nothing particularly matters. Believe is the power of creating attachment. If you do not believe in anything, then you do not get attached in anything. Long lost are ideas like love and duty or whatever. That’s so 18th century. If anything I consider myself pretty representative of the 21st century.

I remember Nate Silver was a transfer pricing consultant at KPMG before he started FiveThirtyEight. After I read his book The Signal and the Noise, I also wanted to be a transfer pricing consultant because that seems like what all the cool kids did these days. He was just vibin’ and creating models in Excel. It seemed like the life I wanted. I would like to vibe.