Vikram Chandra

A lot of you need to do more introspection, obviously.

TLDR There is no inner self, you're chasing an imaginary concept, the end.

Billionaire Marc Andreessen says he has "zero" introspection, and that the idea itself is a modern invention.

actually, Austen did more or less invent a certain sort of "novel of manners" as she went along.... there were other English novels, mostly written by men (Goldsmith, "Vicar of Wakefield"; Richardson, "Clarissa"; Henry Fielding, "Tom Jones") & much earlier, Rabelais, but nothing quite like Austen for her domestic realism, narrow domestic scope, her witty dialogue & intensely "feminine" subjects which would have seemed too trivial for male writers. Austen is comic & satiric without being crude, cruel, or gross; she explores emotions but not passions, or anything overtly sexual; her characters are fussily dressed, but there are no bodies beneath their clothing; her concerns are bourgeois morality, convention; her novels are tidily plotted. I am not a Jane-ite, much preferring the less predictable Brontes, but have to concede, Austen did indeed alter the course of literature to this very day of (somewhat debased, stereotypical) "rom com."

I wrote about this in my piece on my love of ’80s culture, but Rambo is not the only action film of that era that looks far more modernist and carries far deeper subtext than virtually anything being made now, action or otherwise. Terminator, Predator, Aliens, Conan, Cobra, even Die Hard and Lethal Weapon. Almost all of these films were engineered to entertain the masses, or more precisely, masses of adult men, yet they were made by filmmakers steeped in ’70s Hollywood and the European avant-garde. Watch them now and you immediately sense what is missing from contemporary cinema. The slow, meditative, atmospheric pacing of films like First Blood or Predator is plainly indebted to Friedkin’s Sorcerer and even Bresson. The frenetic, high-velocity edits and machine-gun dialogue of Lethal Weapon carry a trace of Godard. And they all share that grainy film stock and muted color palette, an aesthetic density that makes today’s overly sharp, hyper-clean digital look like shit, thin and synthetic. Overall, filmmakers were more serious about the work and about giving audiences intelligent, sophisticated entertainment, and studios still had the nerve to trust directors enough to bring this shit to life. If studios were still capable of making something as singular as First Blood, a film that worked on multiple levels at once, audiences would reward them handsomely. Instead, they treat us like retards..