A Quote by Tao Lin
I don't feel a connection with younger people or with Generation X, or any generation, I feel. If I felt a connection with people my age I wouldn't have written six books about feeling depressed, alienated, lonely. If I did I would have many friends and feel connected with them and probably be a happy person who has a real job.
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With the Holocaust - I wonder if a lot of Jewish writers of my generation have felt this way - it feels really intimidating to approach it. I feel like so many writers who have either lived through it firsthand or were part of that generation where they were closer to the people who were in it have written so beautifully about it, so there's no lack of great books about it
When people do things they weren't even sure they were capable of, I think it comes back to connection. Connection with teammates. Connection with organization. Feeling like they belong in the environment. I think it's a human need - the need to feel connected.
You can be surrounded by many people but still feel quite lonely if you don't have strong connections and if you feel you can't be yourself with them. Conversely, you can just be around a few people, but feel deeply connected to them.
I did go to Vietnam in 2000 as a kind of pilgrimage and to feel my generation was very much a part of this. I felt responsible but also connected and empathetic. It was a very complicated relationship we had, whichever side you were on. The shock of being there was very few people my own age - I was primarily in the North in the streets of Hanoi. A whole generation was essentially decimated.
If a fan approaches me and I feel like they have some kind of agenda, I'm probably gonna get real closed-off and not talk to them. But if I feel a connection with someone, or if I feel a certain trust with somebody, I feel like, 'You know what, I can open up to this person and tell them about an experience.'
What I feel now is connected to people. I feel connected and I feel a lot of love for people. I feel the possibility of what building social movements and what working together in struggle creates. Whatever that energy is, it feels a lot better than what I felt when I was younger - which was worthless and disconnected and isolated and alone.
How can you be afraid to feel? Isn't fear a feeling? If you're feeling fear, you've felt one of the most negative emotions there is to feel. Everything else should be a piece of cake. Feel good, feel happy, feel healthy, feel loved, feel abundant, feel creative, feel compassionate, feel knowledgeable, feel powerful.
I know whether or not I am confused most readily by noticing--being mindful of--my capacity for feeling caring concern. ... when I feel myself in caring connection--encouraging, consoling, or appreciating--I feel the twin pleasures of clarity and goodness. It doesn't matter if the connection I feel is to myself or a person I know or people I don't know or even the whole world. The lively impulse of caring is what counts. [p. 20]
When I realized I was depressed, then I started reading up about it. When I read that one in four people are depressed, I felt that I'm not the only one. I also felt that how many people must be feeling suffocated to fight this battle all alone. I just wanted to reach out and tell them that even I'm like you, and it's okay if you feel like that.
The theme that runs through all my books is connection. Connection - physical and non-physical - with other humans, and connection with nature are necessary for our well-being. Without it, we are depressed, lonely, and fail to thrive.
I'm a fifth generation Jew from the South, and I would say that I felt this connection to my religion, but it wasn't a spiritual connection.
Your connection to other people keeps you human, and that connection, staying human - that's what you have against control. It's like if somebody is being controlled by their job, the connection is to their family. And if they stay connected to those people, the job will never really have control over them.
The millennial generation wants to express every feeling to feel like you're connected to it, and there's something very dark about tragedy that people are drawn to.
I don't think any of my desires or beliefs or other mental states are external to me. Many people will occasionally feel alienated from the motives for an action - "whatever possessed me to do that?". Note, however, that some people feel alienated from the white hairs that recently appeared on their heads - "who put them there?", they might ask the mirror - but the white hairs are still theirs. Similarly, I might feel alienated from an action or a mental state because it does not fit with my visceral self - image.
I'm not the type to generalise about an entire generation. I think the most general thing I can say, is that things are way more dispersed, and way more de-centralised than they were twenty years ago. I don't really feel like people talk about my generation the way people would talk about Generation X in their early 90's when Nirvana blew up. I feel like there was an easier, more coherent narrative to find, than you can now.
When you feel a connection, a gut connection, a heart connection, it's a very special thing. What's familiar to everyone is watching people falling in love; it doesn't happen on screen that often. People fall in lust, then they're suddenly together.
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