Everyone's looking for inspiration

INSPIRED — it’s a loaded word. An exasperated parent may ask “What-in-the-name-a-god inspired you to do that?” as they snatch the creosote-dipped brush from your hand and look at the wallpaper.

Inspiration is said to comprise 5% of genius — the other 95% being perspiration (or transpiration if you’re a plant). These days, inspiration represents approximately 87% of the internet traffic between human beings. Be it an epigram about friendship and love written in the Lucida Calligraphy typeface, set against the backdrop of clouds; a video of an otter’s unlikely relationship with a sloth reminding you that at the heart of it all, we are all just sinew and muscle; or a list of inspirational quotes from self-made men and women; every day across the computosphere, petabytes of inspiration-transfer keep the server farms in West Dublin humming away.

You can’t blame us. Everyone’s looking for inspiration. We need something to condense into an understandable format, the sheer awful randomness and cruelty of human existence.