Aside from the unnecessary burn on Lil Wayne—who is a phenomenal rapper—this is an inspiring message for 2012. I don’t know if I’m entirely concerned about “living meaningfully well”. I’d just like a really good distraction to keep me from screaming in the face of meaninglessness.

As the great poet Antonio Machado once wrote: “walker, there is no path; the path is made by walking.” Never was this truer than in an era of abject institutional failure, social fracture, and economic meltdown. We know where yesterday’s paths lead — not to a shining city we once called prosperity, but to here; dying metropolises, battered exurbs, mass unemployment, nail-biting fear of the future, plutocracy and protest, the crumbling ruins of empire. So map the horizons of your own journey, and, when the status quo tells you it can’t be done, tell the status quo to go to hell.

I am hesitating on exactly how much I’m recommending you read this. This feels like voyeurism of the worst kind, but this article underlines the struggle that humanity faces in an increasingly technological world and what happens when we can’t make sense of the data technology gives us (or when it suddenly stops giving us data). If you have a fear of flying, I would recommend you do not read this.

Here’s a great quote from the article (I added the emphasis):

After this accident, the million-dollar question is whether training, instrumentation, and cockpit procedures can be modified all around the world so that no one will ever make this mistake again—or whether the inclusion of the human element will always entail the possibility of a catastrophic outcome.

Via Genie.