On Meaning
The pursuit of a meaningful life is a tricky one. A precarious balance between forgoing the desire for greener pastures and finding an inherent resolve to become better. To chase is to live in the future, which results in a unconnected presence. To sit complacent is to deprive oneself of the most purposeful experience that is transcendence through change. Try to value sustenance as the means and the end all-together. In action, in work, and in play. - You are not more beautiful than what is outside yourself, nor is the outside more beautiful than you, for each of us is a literal manifestation of a whole dynamic system. Removing the link between "I" and the outside is of most importance in opening oneself up to all there is. - A passion is developed in attempt to fill the void that is our inability to comprehend a facet of the world. It is why I take liberation in reading and writing. For me words make the frustrating beautiful. Or, it is why I am drawn towards statistics. I am dumbfounded by luck, and probability offers an explanation to why things happen. - Live so fully that death is in sight. Just don't kill yourself. - What does is mean to thrive? When progress becomes your addiction and reason for life. - Humans obscure their meaning by ascribing meaning to language. What is cannot perfectly be described. As our reliance on language increases so does our obscuration of what really is. - The happiest are not exactly where they're most comfortable (one's own room), nor where they're least comfortable (out on the open sea), but somewhere in between, because the psyche finds excitement in the unordinary, on the edge, while also finding a sense of pleasure in being in a familiar place, with a sense of control. In other words, pursue a life of adventure, where risks are calculated, and where you may exercise your skills and talents along the way. -
On Truth
The wise carry the weight of the truth, but the ignorant are squandered by it. The difference is that the wise believes in the single objective "raison d'être", while the ignorant thinks purpose is subjectively defined, not found. - Pain isn't a misalignment from the truth. It's the removal process that uncovers truth. The scrubbing of a false veneer, which hurts. - We use beauty - whether it be physical or cerebral - as a marker to estimate value. Too often, and perhaps this is in part due to moral relativism and/or a modern social narrative that praises beauty, we place too much value on beauty in its contribution to the good life. We begin to believe that which embodies complete beauty is that which is completely true. But, as humans, we all have our own interpretation of what we view as beautiful; "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". That which is true is beautiful, but that which is beautiful does not carry an inherent truth value, as it is subjective. Truth is beautiful - but confuse not beauty as truth. -
On Human Psychology
Psychological self-diagnosis is a high variance approach. A human, because of their own psychological intuition has the ability at times to self-evaluate themselves better than any another person may. But a human also has the tendency to self-delude more than another person can wrongly assess. Thus, if you want good advice - ask others. But if you seek truly great advice - ask only yourself. - Awkwardness is a resistance to revealing insecurities. Embarrassment is the state of insecurities being revealed. - We accentuate our innate evolutionarily-grounded psychological fears with culture. The need for hot showers, stocking the pantry up for an apocalyptic episode, and erecting unnecessary fences. When will we start realizing that fear and danger are not the same thing? - Physical incapabilities manifest into mental handicaps, and vice versa. - You are either the product of your environment, or your environment is the product of you. Have your choice. -
On Metaphysical Belief
The theist believes it requires excess faith to think that there is no God, for they see the atheist's beliefs as taking excessive leaps of faith in (usually) scientific understanding. The atheist believes it requires excess faith to think God exists for they see the theist's beliefs as taking excessive leaps of faith in an understanding of anything non-empirical. - Does the immaterial give way to the material... or does the material give way to the immaterial? Each human mind on a subconscious level probabilistically weighs their speculations/beliefs to make this determination. This denotes the difference between a theist and a material atheist. -
On Society
A set of laws that aims to enforce trust within the system need not work, because the trust ought to come from the people; genuine intentions, understanding that relationships and love are at the core of what makes a community, society, and family function. - The subjects of biology, chemistry, and physics, are concerned with how the natural world operates. Sociology, economics, and political science, with how humans operate. Philosophy with why the universe and humans alike bother to operate to begin with. - Regression towards the mean keeps humankind bound to a common humanness. It's an evolutionary checks and balance system. -
Miscellaneous / Multidisciplinary
Love is patient. Lust is not. - We use heuristics to navigate the world. Thus understanding the world by way of analogy or metaphors, guided by heuristics, always will have an associated risk. We run the risk of misaligning what actually is from what we perceive to be true by our attempted understanding of the world by way of our heuristics. Thus, heuristics are both a blessing and a curse. - Memorylessness is a statistical concept. What it describes is that some things in nature have an expected fixed rate of occuring for the first, second, third, etc. success, regardless of the success or failure of prior outcomes. A fair coin will always be equally land heads or tails, regardless of its prior coin flips. Humans, on the other hand, are not memoryless. We are prone to a change in future outcomes based on a changing belief in ourselves, because we carry a memory of succeeding or failing. In reality, when we succeed or fail, we adjust our believe of the chance of a future success or failure. If we fail, often we get discouraged and adjust our behavior such that we have a higher likelihood of failure next time. Conversely, a past success provides confidence for a future one, increasing the likelihood of success. Our minds foster a self-fulfilling prophecy. My suggestion here is that if we begin try to view our failures as an unknown fixed rate, rather than a function of our past failures, we save ourselves from a self-sabotaging mentality that thinks our past failures are entirely a representation of our true ability, and not whatever luck is at play. When we succeed, acknowledge that you may have gotten lucky, to save yourself from developping an inflated confidence in your true ability. Ultimately, estimating your ability based off of previous attempts is only good insofar if enough attempts were made. Even if enough attempts were made, your percieved ability should never determine your percieved self-worth. Because your self-worth is determined by the degree of your self-acceptance, and you can and should accept yourself regardless of your ability.