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March 14 - March 19, 2023
“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough,” said renowned theoretical physicist Richard Feynman.
We are but collections of constantly changing interactions between the world and our thoughts, and thus, the idea of a fixed, independent, identifiable self is a delusion.
By sheer lack of alternatives, we understand the world with thoughts and words.
Just like how the center of a tornado is calm with little to no motion, despite it being surrounded by a coil of rapid, violent wind, we can live in the center of the tornado of knowing and unknowing and still remain calm and at ease.
You are not the master of your mind. You are not the servant. You are both and neither.
When we persist with the belief that things outside of ourselves or things in the future will provide us with a form of ultimate happiness, we exchange the real moments of our lives for ones that do not exist.
Wealth, materialistic abundance, fame, and power have no value in a happy life if the person who possesses them has not yet learned to live properly without them.
we suffer more from imagination than from reality.”
Seneca thought that because the present is so brief and immaterial, we mostly struggle to properly perceive and value it.
Seneca believed that one should spend their time fulfilling their duties and responsibilities, enjoying any wealth and fortune that might come of them, but not work for the purpose of social status or material success beyond one’s minimal needs, because beyond almost everything else, he argued for allocating as much time as possible to leisure—more specifically, a particular type of well-focused leisure in which one finds tranquility, introspection, and stillness.
By considering, or at least pondering time and how to best use it, one is paradoxically using it well.
There is clear value in now, and thus, there is clear value in the nows yet to come—value that we must consider when treating the now we are in,
that there is a ring of layers that comprises our self: our outward, social personas, our conscious layers, our unconscious layers, and then a core, true self at the center of it all, which when one goes through the process of uncovering and integrating every layer into consciousness, a sense of completeness, harmony, and vitality is experienced in the form of a truer self.
the average person should simply make their best efforts to let go of ideals of happiness and pleasure, and instead, focus on the minimization of pain. Happiness in life, for Schopenhauer, is not a matter of joys and pleasures, but rather, the reduction of and freedom from pain as much as possible.
One of Nietzsche’s key ideas at the foundation of his attempt to resolve this issue is the recognition that there is in fact no universal, objective truth to be known. “There are no facts, only interpretations,” he wrote.
Nietzsche sets up the overman to function as a sort of idealized version of oneself—an image of a perfect and powerful being who has overcome all their fears and deficiencies, which one can and should set goals to strive toward. Of course, as an ideal, it cannot ever truly be reached, but that is functionally the point.
“If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how,” Nietzsche wrote.
Nietzsche suggested that we must symbolically die throughout life so that we can get out of our own way and become something greater, sometimes sacrificing our self, our personal preservation, health, or sanity,
The true challenge and task of life, for Nietzsche, is to fall in love with what you are actually experiencing right now, as it is, in all the ways it is. He wrote: I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
And perhaps sometimes the only way to experience the beauty of things is to think about things in a beautiful way.
Amor fati is a sentiment of willingness to accept at last the way things have gone and will go, to love a life that tries in almost every moment to make you hate it, and to still stare back at it and say yes, I love it. What’s scarier than an opponent who smiles while being beaten?
We are] simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?”
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
If we are not made with a specific purpose prior to existence, we create our purpose through our existence.
whatever the choice may be, we will only ever know the outcome of the one we take. And no path that we take will ever ultimately resolve the uncertainty of life.
Perhaps we must learn how to fundamentally be ok with being wrong, or we will loathe ourselves until the end.
Those who are often angered reveal themselves to be a strange sort of optimist, still in denial of the tragedies of this life and the death of their youthful innocence—the belief that life can be what it can’t.
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
When we believe the world is congenial and manageable in some just way, when we think we are at the center of all things and all events in the world that happen to us happen at us, when we neglect to consider that suffering and ignorance are fundamental to all people, anger can and likely will eat us alive.
If, like Sartre suggests, we see ourselves by being seen by others, or as Charles Cooley put it, “I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am,” then perhaps we must see how other people see as carefully and as generously as we can.
Emerson also asserted that nature is in a constant state of flux, and that we must live in synchronization with its process, trusting our own intuition and flowing with the changing self. In order to do this, we must not hold ourselves to ideas, beliefs, or traditions of the past, including our own.
Emerson suggested that our state is subject to change, and consequently, that we might feel or think one way today, but the opposite way tomorrow. Instead of fighting this, however, Emerson argued that we must lean into it.
For Emerson, great artists, thinkers, and writers aren’t necessarily great merely because they have access to any higher, exclusive source of information or being, but because they are willing to address and express candidly what they feel in any given moment of life, despite how it might compare to the apparent norm. In doing so, they reveal not only their unique take on the world, but also the thoughts and sensations hidden within a great many others who feel the same.
perhaps there are variations in the resources and conditions for each individual, and thus, each person’s ability to trust and express themselves is not always equal.
To know and trust one’s self in the face of consistent change, confusion, and a world that works to consolidate everyone is perhaps one of the hardest things anyone can do.
What’s worse than living a life knowing that one will die is living a life knowing that one will die without having lived as many moments as one can properly relishing in the fact that they have not yet died.
One must be careful to not make the singularness of their shot at existence a pressure to get it all right—to do all the right things and think all the right thoughts and feel all the right feelings. The point is quite the opposite; you will mostly do a lot of the wrong things, think a lot of the wrong thoughts, and feel a lot of the wrong feelings. But precisely because this is your one shot at life, this must be ok.
everything and nothing are one, in simultaneous, interlocked coordination with one another;
If we are to be fully human and fully alive and aware, it seems that we must be willing to suffer for our pleasures. Without such willingness, there can be no growth in the intensity of consciousness . . . to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness. Alan Watts
Like the inhale and exhale of each breath, the positive and negative flows in and out of us, constantly keeping us moving, progressing, and alive. Only when we hold our breath and try to keep all the oxygen in do we suffocate.
Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law.
We recognize that affecting a small thing in the past can dramatically change the present, but yet, we rarely think about the way in which affecting a small thing in the present can dramatically change the future. Right now, without time travel as an option, reality still works the same way.
