alone – Page 2 – secretive dreams

Echo is basically Amazon’s answer to Siri, the virtual iPhone assistant. Unlike Siri, however, Echo is a stationary device, a cylinder parked in your living room or kitchen or bedroom — or perhaps all three. It answers questions, tells jokes, plays music, serves as an alarm clock, takes shopping orders and in general becomes a buffer between family members who cannot talk to one another. In a promotional video, Echo had aspects of both Mary Poppins and HAL, the computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with perhaps a touch of “The Matrix.” […]
Some viewers of the video were appalled. “The dystopian world of the Echo advertisement is a near future (really, a present) in which no one knows anything, and everyone relies on a humanoid device to mediate their most intimate personal interactions — between parent and child, between husband and wife, between brother and sister,” Jonathan Sherman-Presser wrote in a popular LinkedIn post. “Implicit in this picture is that the family portrayed has accepted this as a worthwhile trade-off for the utility the Echo affords them.”

Mr. Sherman-Presser concluded that he found himself wondering: “What is Amazon’s vision of the role that technology plays in society? And what is its view of the world we live in — and would want to live in?”

The clear implication was that Amazon’s view was a bleak one, where people are reduced to creatures of consumption. But in the hundreds of comments the post got, more than a few people responded by saying: I want to live in that world right now.

David Straitfeld, With Amazon’s Echo, You are Never Alone

The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.

Charlotte Brontë

You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.

Carl Sagan, Contact

I really don’t know what ‘I love you’ means. I think it means ‘Don’t leave me here alone.’

Neil Gaiman (via voodoofingers)

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

Octavio Paz

But no one came. Because no one ever does.

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

…you lick your lips, you taste like years of being alone.

Warsan Shire, how to wear your mothers lipstick (the desperation)

warsan vs melancholy (the seven stages of being lonely)

There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you’ll reach a moment where someone goes, ‘Oh, that’s a bit heavy,’ or ‘Eew, disgusting.’ And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.

Alain de Botton

When she needed help most, she was abandoned–and only when she offered help to others was she beloved.

Matthew Quick, The Silver Linings Playbook

…the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and that you’re alone. It’s down there.

Louis C.K.