If ordinary people can really figure out how to set the alarm at a hotel, then we are going to make OpenOffice default to vi keybindings in the next … - Nat Friedman

People rag on western medicine a lot for its disregard of indirect causalities and holism, for its antisceptic deconstructivism, for its blindness to things like the union of mind and body, and for its proclivity for post-facto treatment...But these criticisms notwithstanding, modern medicine is the accumulation of years and years of human effort to taxonomically observe, understand and explain an enormous set of conditions within a massively complex, underspecified system. To me, this is impressive. Also, they use cool phrases like "the radiolucent lungs" and "ligamentous laxity."

The whole youth-idolatry oh-god-not-another-birthday thing has to be the most sure-fire way to be unhappy about the way things are progressing in your life.