[...] Humor is a meditation upon death. It is by this difference that we are best able to understand the nature of a life lived in the comic mode. The fact that I will not live two hundred years, let alone forever, is what is preventing me from writing my gelastical magnum opus. It is also what makes gelastics possible in the first place: that we are mortal, and therefore doomed. [...]

But could there really be no liberation short of offing the tyrant? Is there not another species of emancipation in flights of the spirit, even if they change nothing in our material reality? The playing field of the imagination is infinite, after all. So even though humor forces us back into our heavy bodies--and even though, therefore, we can never mistake a gelastic experience for an aesthetic one--nevertheless in the gelastic mode too we experience a variety of freedom. [...]

Because otherwise you have cultures that are mired in their own ways of thinking--there's no development, there's no provocation to think differently. You have to provoke. You have to create a bit of uncertainty. Unless you believe that everything's perfect and that people shouldn't question the way things are, or improve. Comedy is a way of opening the mind.

Or take the late-night shows--they are so conservative in their comedy. It's the worst thing! It does the opposite of what comedy's supposed to do. If comedy is supposed to open people's minds, then you go to Colbert, for instance, and all he does is thirty Trump-is-shit jokes? Everyone knows this! Those jokes do nothing. All they do is reify, and what you have is the ideological. I think people today are looking for their spokesperson. They're looking for their spiritual leader, their political leader. That's not what a comedy show is for. G to your political rally then.

[...] Others speak of the emptiness of consumer culture. Zoubeir [...] told Thomson, "When you see that the only project of Western democracies today is to offer people purchasing power, that's empty, that doesn't make you want to live."

[...] I work as a product manager alongside a team of engineers and designers, eat lunch for free, socialize and discuss current events with my co-workers, and leave the premises late in the evenings. The work is immersive and all-consuming; every feature and bug is carefully triaged, every assumption and decision rigorously debated. This setup hearkens to the platonic ideal of the corporation--the idea that the corporation is, as the writer George Saunders once recounted, a "beautiful contemporary construct ... where if you just produce, you would be protected." In the model propagated by progressive tech companies, labor is reframed as talent that warrants nurturing, against the backdrop of a support structure that includes free meals, on-site health care, education stipends, generous vacation and parental leave policies, and yes, the double-decker bus that transports you to and from your office. There is nothing left to do but one's life's work.