Learning from others

I have read a couple of articles about a former grocery store then restaurant, called Shopsin’s in New York. They appear as part of the zeitgeist (which I try to partake of sparingly) then fade back to live with the memes about minions and that name that was on everyone’s lips for two weeks. The restaurant itself is probably not somewhere I would fly across the world to see, but from those articles I had a brief introduction to its late owner with his famously foul-mouth and the rules he ran his business on.

Kenny Shopsin is not someone I agree with wholeheartedly, and I doubt if we’d have been friends, but one or two of his philosophies resonate with me, in particular:

On the meaning of life:

“The only way to not be crushed by the stupidity of life is to pursue something energetically and gain as much satisfaction as you can before it gets stupid — and just ignore the fact that it’s stupid. The whole thing is shitty. You’re gonna fucking die.”

The decision to follow the thing that gives you the most satisfaction, the thing that drives you to seek it out even when others wonder aloud why you would, is fascinating and massively appealing to me.

The problem is finding what it is.