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> In other words, the more we seek to control the world, the more it will fail to speak to us, and, consequently the more alienated and dissatisfied we will feel

> Rosa develops his thesis from the observation that human experience is grounded in the perception that “something is present,” and that this awareness even “precedes the distinction between subject and world.” Gradually, we learn to distinguish between the self and the world

> a failure to experience resonance “leads to anxiety, frustration, anger, and even despair, which then manifest themselves, among other things, in acts of impotent political aggression.”

> “We invariably encounter such things as a challenge to do better.” "life revolves around and amounts to nothing more than tackling an ever-growing to-do list. all matters to be settled, attended to, mastered, completed, resolved, gotten out of the way.”

> in the aftermath of September 11th that this point was driven vividly home to me by the immediate and evidently panicked insistence that, above all else, Americans should not cease buying stuff. Sure, hug your loved ones, but you’ve got 0% financing to take advantage of.

> should any sizable portion of the population suddenly decide that their well-being was not served by buying more things, the modern economy would collapse.

> “this escalatory perspective has gradually turned from a promise into a threat.” “What generates this will to escalation,” he explains, “is not the promise of improvement in our quality of life, but the unbridled threat that we will lose what we have already attained.”

> The game of escalation,” Rosa argues, “is perpetuated not by a lust for more, but by the fear of having less and less. Whenever and wherever we stop to take a break, we lose ground against a highly dynamic environment, with which we are always in competition.”