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K I’m Done
100 something essays later… My aim with this blog: to “know myself” and “help people suffer less”. I feel good about the first part – the journey to “know myself” is now quite alive, and will carry on as long as I do. As for “help people suffer less”, I never really knew what to…
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What *IS* Wisdom?
“Wisdom is one of the grandest and oddest words out there, so lofty it doesn’t sound like something one could ever consciously strive to be. Nevertheless, it deserves to be an aspiration.” Alain de Botton “Wisdom is one of those qualities that is difficult to define—because it encompasses so much—but which people generally recognize when…
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Hello? Can We Agree Wisdom’s Missing?
“A crisis of wisdom as the defining crisis of our time? This diagnosis, and from a scientist and scholar at that, is unusual. Science, psychology and even the multitude of modern and postmodern therapies and social practices, have not been able to fill the vacuum.” Thomas Steininger “Who wants to be wise anymore? People want…
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10 Years of Gym and Running
“There’s a deep continuity between the way biological life self-organizes and the way cognition self-organizes, which means there is a deep interconnection and interdependence between the functioning of your brain and the functioning of your body.” John Vervaeke Does the world need another fitness essay or influencer? Nah. I will merely share as evidence –…
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Global Crises & Risks
For certain, we can each know personal peace and freedom. Even so, it would be naive to ignore the greatest challenges in our global society. By acknowledging them, we can conduct and shape our lives in a way that doesn’t exacerbate them, either for us, or other people. These topics will be tracked and expanded…
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Where Are Our Shared Values?
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882 Individuality and civility are opposing forces. In one extreme, we serve individuality – be it expression or conquests. In the other extreme, we serve others. Where on this continuum do we…
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Wisdom Sources
“We are suffering from a wisdom famine.” John Vervaeke “We long for beauty, wisdom, and purpose. We want to live for something more than just ourselves.” Alain de Botton Wisdom Sources A wisdom source is a collection of ideas and practices for living a good life. The hallmark of a wisdom source is comprehensiveness –…
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Relax… We’re All Broken
“It is not our souls that are broken but, as neuroscience teaches us, it is our minds, These minds, the faulty walnuts we interpret reality through, did not evolve in ways that render them easy companions in the harried conditions of modern life. And it’s not just we who are broken. We live in societies…
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WAKE UP!
“They say: ‘THAT was MORE REAL! That was REALLY REAL! And because of my desire to be in contact with what’s real, I’m going to change myself, and I’m going to change my world.’ They start to transform their whole lives and their whole self. The whole agent-arena relationship is radically and revolutionarily restructured.” John…
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Welcome to McLife
“Society tells us to direct our hopes in two areas- Romantic love and professional success. And it distracts us with news, movies, and consumption. It’s not enough, as we know. Especially at three in the morning.” Alain de Botton “Welcome to McLife. What’s your order?” I’ll have a dream job, love life, and intermittent bouts…
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Red Pills
“Neo goes from being in this sort of cocooned and programmed world, to having to participate in the construction of meaning to his life.” Lana Wachowski, Red Pill Blue Pill “They were convinced the world was illusion—a seriously warped picture of reality that in turn warped their life with bad consequences. Thanks to meditation and…
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Where’s Our Wellbeing and Wisdom Renaissance?
Where do you go for information? … internet? Where do you go for knowledge? … university? science? history?Where do you go for wisdom? John Vervaeke “We long for beauty, wisdom, and purpose. We want to live for something more than just ourselves.” Alain de Botton WHY — is modern life so vexing? In 2022, the…
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Wisdom, and Search For Meaning
“Rationality is not merely being ‘logical’. Rationality is realizing your capacity for self-deception and illusion, and, for self correction. The core motivation of rationality is to come into contact with reality as close as possible, by those means that are reliable as possible.” John Vervaeke “[Life] sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation…
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Psychedelics Without Psychedelics
Psychedelics – now a potential miracle cure, after decades of warnings and illegality. How absurd? Most likely the truth lives somewhere in the middle of sensational claims and criticism – still in the fog. Legalization for the average citizen may take some time. Even then, the experience might be hard to access or understand. Yet…
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The Illusion of ‘Default Reality’
“The unexamined life is not worth living” Socrates We don’t know who we are. Not in an autobiographical sense, but in the sense of fundamental consciousness, somewhere within the human brain… Socrates implored, “know thyself”. Consciousness is us. Further, consciousness is more vulnerable, manipulable, constrained, flawed, and disorienting that we can grasp, by default. In…
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Tunnel Vision, Self Deceit, Brain Constraint. Feeling Stuck.
“We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself, mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the evidence, thus moving through a dream of our own making that we call life.” Maria Popova “The very same machinery that makes you so adaptively intelligent is the same machinery that…
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Dear Everyone I Leave Behind
An extremely close friend passed today. I wonder, what would he want the world to know about him, and how he experienced life? What would you want the world to know about you? Dear Everyone I Leave Behind Dear everyone, I believe we don’t need anything to be happy. Happiness is a baseline condition to…
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Essential Distance
One thing I intend to never do again for the rest of my life: Camp out on the internet and gawk. Lapping-up hot takes about what is unfolding in the world, and allow it to poison my entire sense of the world and existence. So silly… There is more beauty in the world than ugliness.…
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Our Future Fetish
“Our survival ain’t taking place on Mars or any goddamned space ship.” Doug Peacock Our Future Fetish Just wait, until we land on the moon. How great everything will be! [producer whispers… off camera] Oh fuck me, sorry folks. I’m being told — we’ve done that. And it was indeed inspirational and led to all…
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Dear Empathetic Person
To anyone with pronounced empathy, I suspect observing humanity causes great pain? Which you are either living with — or — you developed a strategy to insulate yourself from. Put another way: Being alive begets knowing the majority of the human population is suffering. Further, it may (or may not), lead one to question the…