prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. This case of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency … which we call the ‘levelling down’ of all possibilities of Being…. The ‘they’ is there alongside everywhere, but in such a manner that it has always stolen away whenever Dasein presses for a decision. Yet because the ‘they’ presents every judgment and decision as its own, it deprives the particular Dasein of its answerability.

“Solitude in nature is a myth. What you find in nature is a much deeper connection with all this other life around you, a connection that precedes language and the alienation that’s embodied in language.”

“To me, the most dramatic lesson of COVID wasn’t how much of nature was out there, hiding in plain sight, but the possibility of change, the immediate, sudden change in how we live and work, the idea that global capitalism could be completely turned off for weeks at a time.”

“Preoccupation with planning for the future is tied up with that preoccupation with accumulating surplus to survive the season and all the unhealthy things that produces, even if that’s the killer app of our civilization.”

“The narrower the aperture, the more plausible the ambition.”

Thoreau urged his audience…to reconsider the settled spaces they inhabited…. “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”