We don’t have to artificially create and fetishise it, as pain, tragedy, and unhappiness are already concomitant with the vicissitudes of life.
Rahul Samaranayake
September 30, 2022
I wonder if those Nietzschean critiques, with their eruditeness and polemical virtuosity, tend to fall in love with their own ingenious.
August 04, 2022
Our penchant for becoming ideologues, for finding psychic stability through the prescription and imposition of dogmas onto the world, is unsurprising.
July 03, 2022
One would have thought that in this age of information, logical fallacies would cease to exist. But, amazingly, the exact opposite has happened despite our incredible access to information.
Jacob Bell
June 05, 2022
A “self”. The thing is, it is not so simple as to live out the storyline of “one true self”, for life is not so simple as to be lived impulsively.
Euwyn Goh
May 07, 2022
There are really two ways to interact with the world. As a fool seeking Beauty or as a victim seeking Justice.
Allyson Flake Matsoso
April 02, 2022
I don’t see sociopolitical systems ever being effective in dealing with matters of the heart.
February 27, 2022
Toward a more holistic understanding of life, world, and reality.
February 06, 2022
Everyone’s worldview is complex, and language is tyrannical, in some sense. As soon as anything felt is articulated, it is irreversibly reduced.
January 01, 2022
It is crucial that our youth expect that difficulty will come when they diverge from the majority. This path won’t help them be the “cool kid”, but their shining example could bring hope to the hopeless. They may not march in the crowd – but in attempting to model a virtuous and moral life they will bring back an Ideal lost to many.
December 06, 2021
How My Mindfulness Practice Led Me To Meltdown
Dan Lawton
November 28, 2021
He believed that happiness and living virtuously are tied to one another. For Chrysippus, wisdom and virtue are essentially the same thing.
November 22, 2021
We can find precious memories even in a “bad home”. We can turn pain into triumph. We should avoid catastrophizing the imperfections of our parents or allowing a difficult childhood to define us. Human history is full of suffering, full of parents who made a mess of things.
November 06, 2021
I fear that we’ve abandoned our emotions, intuitions and every other aspect of being human at the behest of our intellect that we idolise so much.
October 20, 2021
“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow…” — Edvard Munch
October 08, 2021
The evidence is overwhelming: we are far more powerful than the technology that is supposedly mind-controlling us. It’s not even close.
Nir Eyal
September 25, 2021
When we are stuck in blame – when we seek someone to accuse for every difficulty of life – we start to see our fellow man as opponents, rather than fellow-travelers in this difficult life.
September 11, 2021
While working and studying remotely has its perks, we have now also experienced in full the drawback of remote life. That is, we feel deprived of physical connection. We dread the predictability of life at home.
August 28, 2021
Broken and embittered from past experiences, one can quite easily and even justifiably become a creature of hell and in turn a creator of hell for others. One could take another path, however, and try to find the wisdom which hides in the darkest depths of any hellish situation.
August 15, 2021
To solve the climate crisis, the only winning strategy will be love.
Alison Lea Sher
July 31, 2021
For the world to become “real” to us, we must encounter it. Young people are full of hope, idealism, and a desire to make the world a better place. How wonderful are these instincts! Yet, often these instincts are ill used. Without accompanying experience, knowledge, and empathy, an idealistic young person can damage more than repair.
July 17, 2021
To my partner’s annoyance, I have a running joke I make at social gatherings about wanting to have ten kids one day — enough to play a five-on-five basketball game. I tell myself the reason behind the joke is for some engaging befuddling humour to lighten up the mood in a room, even though it mostly leaves me having to explain the joke awkwardly, and even then, most people do not find it funny.
March 24, 2021
Throughout the history of humankind, it hasn’t been uncommon to see humans supporting each other in heinous acts. Some of us supported slavery. Some of us supported the Nazis. One might say that our predecessors were relatively uneducated, and that we’ve now learnt from the mistakes we’ve made. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
March 18, 2021
Is our culture moving backwards? In the last hundred years we have seen a tremendous change in society. In the West, rights and privileges have expanded and there is relative peace and prosperity. Until recently, it looked as if Martin Luther King’s dream for his children, “not to be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” was a real possibility.
March 04, 2021
It took me five years to write The Millennial’s Guide to Changing the World, because my intentions for writing it went through so many metamorphoses. I’ve decided that there are noble, level-headed, and productive reasons to want to change the world and there are batshit crazy reasons to want to change the world that will likely land you in a ditch somewhere with burned bridges all around you.
February 05, 2021
Why do we imitate? As babies, we imitate to make sense of the physical world around us. I recently came across a fascinating study where an adult touched a light panel with his head to illuminate it, and some observing 18-month-olds performed this novel act even after a 1-week delay. Once we have passed this phase, we imitate for a few reasons. Firstly on the utilitarian side, imitation helps us bypass trial-and-error processes, to make learning much more efficient. Secondly on the social side, we imitate to be socially accepted. As they say, “monkey see, monkey do”. I’ll be focusing on the social aspect of imitation in this essay.
January 24, 2021
Books such as Atomic Habits have been immensely influential and beneficial in my life. The brevity and rigour of James Clear have broadened my perspective on the synergy between systematic thinking and productivity. I am grateful for talented authors like him, who make our lives better through words. Having said that, some of the ideas shared in modern self-help books seem to be overly focused on systematic and peripheral changes, over more heartfelt, penetrating changes to a human being like self-realisation, self-actualisation and finally self-transcendence.
February 12, 2020
