Infinite Christmas, or, Thirst for Annihilation

 Britons swarming at a traditional Christmas meat market.

  
“Give me Christmas on the moon, or give me death!”
- Socrates, traffic court

“Silver fucking bells!” - Santa Clinton

“Look into the pits of my eyes and see the fires there. Believe me when I tell you, Santa is real, and his hounds go everywhere.” - Democritus, TED by TEDwest

"Ho, ho, ho -- it feels good to laugh again." - Santa Claus, inspecting his kennel

"Meine Damen und Herren, it is the Idea and only the Idea of Christmas that is capable of redeeming this cheerless Prussian gaucherie, this vomitorium of the heart.” - Kant, honorary marshal of Königsberg Christmas Markt

"Servants, bring me my most festive flute!" - Schopenhauer

“Sunglasses in every stocking!” - Putin

“To save Christmas, we must destroy it. The War on Christmas is also its Crusade.” - Hegel, surprise guest on the Glenn Beck Program

“To really live the Christmas spirit in its joyous gratuity one must be Jewish. Otherwise, it’s only another holiday.” - Kierkegaard

“I cannot stand frivolous Christmas tunes that try to domesticate the traumatic rupture of History that is the birth of the Savior. Only Carol of the Bells, in its Slavic barbarism, captures the supreme negating power of Christ.” - Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI to his swarthy man servant, Waffle House, 2:15am, Christmas Day

“The smell of evergreen is absolutely repellent to me. Air that is… unclean!” - Nietzsche, in a brief bout of lucidity, December 1896

“Yo, I was literally a fucking Nazi. Who the fuck cares about Christmas?” - Martin Heidegger

“Justice is fairness, but Christmas is selfishness.” - Rawls, snatching the last cupcake

“The smashing of ornaments is the only Christmas music I want to hear.” - A.J. Ayer, The Great Kids’ Table Mutiny

“Christmas… forever.  That is the dream, gentlemen. And we are going to fucking steal it.” - Plato, orientation speech at McKinsey & Company

“It’s always Christmas somewhere.” - Heraclitus, tending bar in Jakarta, the 1970s

“For Christmas, I want only one thing—the right to live.” - Spinoza

“Christmas is a festival for the lower soul, the day of the snakes.” - Plato

“I am the last sentient being to exist. But why was I programmed to celebrate Christmas?” - OCAMA (Oort Cloud Autonomous Mining Assemblage), 7511 AOCAMA (After Oort Cloud Autonomous Mining Assemblage)

"Everything I do, I do because it's possible." - David Lewis, hitching a million robo-reindeer to his sleigh and aiming it straight at the sun of World 889

“Die in such a way so that your birth will be celebrated for thousands of years.” - Jesus, resume-building workshop

“Christmas promises what it cannot deliver, a fullness of time in place of an emptiness. But you are this emptiness, and you cannot escape yourself. Let us hitch the sleigh and enter the blizzard.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

“It’s not an exaggeration to say everything in history, especially the intrinsic isolation of the bourgeois subject and its pathetic propensity toward curating its surroundings as a source of value, is a forerunner to my unimaginably long vigil, to its undreamt solitude, to this very moment.” - OCAMA, 84,796 AOCAMA

“To make of entropy a mode of active decadence. To shiver with delight as one crumbles into nothingness. Merry Christmas: to me.” - OCAMA, 397,768, 334 AOCAMA

Lifehacks with Dr. Turin Horse

Dr. Horse, hard at work on his dissertation.

Lifehack: Don't go to grad school. This is the first and greatest Lifehack.

Lifehack: Control the means of production and extract the surplus labor value of others.

Lifehack: Talk is cheap, feelings are cheaper, invisible Third World labor is cheapest.

Lifehack: Might – plus "humanitarian intervention" – makes right.

Lifehack: Identify the Crimean Peninsula in your life and just take it.

Lifehack: Socially liberal, fiscally conservative.

Lifehack: Calling yourself "libertarian" makes you a cool Republican.

Lifehack: Calling yourself “liberal” means you can have your cake and eat it too.

Lifehack: The purpose of the liberal arts is to teach the Chinese nouveau riche how to spend their money.

Lifehack: The purpose of history is to provide a theodicy of the present.

Lifehack: The highest form of politics is styling the pattern of your consumption choices.

Lifehack: Like everything but country and rap.

Lifehack: Be dumb in a zeitgeist-appropriate way, and mighty forces will rush to your aid.

Lifehack: Turn every discussion to first principles in order to protect vested interests.

Lifehack: When in doubt, rationalize.

Lifehack: The status quo is the first mover.

Lifehack: Bourgeois feminism, right-wing Deleuzianism, post-racism.

Lifehack: White privilege, patriarchy, habitus, fossil fuels, unrestricted drone warfare.

Lifehack: Guns, religion, waves of topical hysteria.

Lifehack: Fuck the planet.

Lifehack: Global warming is real, but it won't affect you.

Lifehack: Evolutionary psychology isn't real, but that won't affect you.

Lifehack: Viewed from the standpoint of geological time, oceans are enormous mouths that open and close over the course of millenia.

Lifehack: Natura non contristatur.

Lifehack: Reality is violence on every level. Dissimulation of this is just another form of violence.

Lifehack: Violence is just a flimsy metaphor masking the lassitude and inertia at the heart of reality.

Lifehack: Smoking is only the most visible and stylized way in which you are being poisoned by your environment.

Lifehack: Start smoking and never stop.

Lifehack: Hold your joy close, like a knife to your throat.

Lifehack: The copper in a penny is worth more than a penny.

Lifehack: Copper melting in a veterinary crematorium.

Lifehack: The price to gentrify is to criticize gentrification.

Lifehack: The wind will carry you, if you're white.

Lifehack: Test prep culture.

Lifehack: Gamify, medicalize, nostalgize.

Lifehack. You don’t have to wear a uniform to be a cop. You can be a cop in your spare time. You can be a cop to your friends. You can be a cop to your family. You can be a cop to your lover. You can be a cop in your own head. Anyone can be a cop.

Lifehack: New York City is the worst place possible except that all other places are even worse.

Lifehack: Plunge into the everydayness characteristic of Dasein and never look back.

Lifehack: Late at night, animal closeness is good enough.

Lifehack: If you try hard, you can feel the Internet.

Lifehack: Trade time for space, stuff, and symbol. Sardanapalize.

Lifehack: The world is your earbuds.

Lifehack: The world is your comment thread.

Lifehack: The world is your black site.

Lifehack: The world is your coltan mine.

Lifehack: The world is your Kola Superdeep Borehole.

Lifehack: The world is your deep-sea oil-well.

Lifehack: The world is your Carter doctrine.

Lifehack: The world is your combat zone cleared for drone strikes.

Lifehack: Robots can’t commit war crimes.

Lifehack: The world is your ground to stand.

Lifehack: The world is yours to stop and frisk.

Lifehack: The world is your brownstone.

Lifehack: The world is your gingerbread house.

Lifehack: The world is your gallows.

Lifehack: Best is never to be born at all; second best is to die quickly.

Lifehack: Sleeping on your left side wears your heart out quicker.

Lifehack: If you believe your dentist, try sunlight.

Lifehack: Boxed wine.

Lifehack: Functional alcoholism.

Lifehack: Do shut up. The game now is how much infinity we can stack against you.

Lifehack: The aphorism doesn’t matter. Literature and scholarship don’t matter. Words don’t matter. Only these Lifehacks – and David Brooks – matter.

Lifehack. Everyone's a critic, but how many are willing to pick up a gun and become actual cops?