A fully predictable, reified self gives up any reason for living

Evidence

Thinking about what it would mean to submit to such a process, becoming a more and more reified version of “myself,” I’m reminded of the way Thoreau described unthinking people in “Civil Disobedience”: as basically dead before their time. If I think I know everything that I want and like, and I also think I know where and how I’ll find it—imagining all of this stretching endlessly into the future without any threats to my identity or the bounds of what I call my self—I would argue that I no longer have a reason to keep living. After all, if you were reading a book whose pages began to seem more and more similar until you were reading the same page over and over again, you would put the book down. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 473

Categorization

• CANDY: The ‘book that repeats the same page’ analogy reads live in an elevator — a genuinely tweetable compression of the whole argument.
• XREF: connects to: A man who has no object to negate has no real future