Self-Help-In-A-Sentence

Quotes, Memes, Insta Posts, Gifs, all white flour or vitamins in a plastic bottle.

White flour is fine, but like a dessert, small and it’s just part of the meal.

Quotes are snacks. A cookie, a cracker, they often make you hungry for more, but more white flour never satisfies.

Sure that might be the bump you need, and might be able to sustain you for a bit until you realize you are overfed and malnourished. All gist and no grist. There is nothing to rough you up and there is no context to grapple. There is no flawed artist stumbling in your reading, no trudge through their dross, no boredom, no boredom, no boredom. All finale. All answered. All is right. Yet somehow without doing the work it doesn’t satisfy. All show - no substance, we are left hungry.

We chew the kale, not the vitamin. Vitamins needs living carriers.

Memes are distillates, but we can’t live off whiskey. Quotes are confection perfection, but more deeply understood after arriving there at the end of the meal and probably shared with the table.

So how can we use (or be used) by the meme.

It’s the hook and the bait to be taken somewhere else. To get ensnared means to go deeper, to follow the hunch, to see where this incredible quote came from and all the work involved in its distillation. Now you are complicit in the work. You go with it until you are changed and return to the full embodiment of the entire process. Not just inflamed by processed white flour, but you come back alight with wisdom of the whole grain of truth.

“So we beat on boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past…” has all the vitamins and minerals of the entirety of Gatsby, but if you didn’t read the novel there is no roughage to chew and digest with satisfaction of a complete meal.