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This is an extremely ‘meta’ post about life and happiness. But with that said, perhaps a hard won truth.
Without being too ‘abstract’ about it: Above the basics needed, the expression of courage is what brings happiness to life. It is why having kids, or giving to charity, climbing everest or making something beautiful is a worthwhile endeavor.
Without any positive engagement (and by engagement I mean Willful Acts times Risk – ie. the expression of courage in some way shape or form) these things are meaningless. I had said it earlier – resistance is what gives all meaning to life, and believe it (metaphysically-speaking) to be a related concept.
Perhaps an analogy is as simple as mass applied to vector. In this case resistance is applied to (directional) will. The interaction of the two brings the world closer to the way you wish it to be.
Certainly not there yet, but it perhaps a personal breakthrough. Trying to understand all this.
Either way, I feel now that the expression of courage in some way shape or form is the most meaningful thing that you can do to find contentment within yourself.
My answers are usually quite – shall we say realistic – when people ask me what it is like to live in NY. It’s tough here, but the quality which I realize and now appreciate more. True of all big cities and all wide open places, is the ability to create your own reality and try to convert it into the reality of the world. Perhaps not your desired apartment or having to share a cafe table with 3 people – but inbetween that, you can start ‘swimming’ towards whatever vision you wish. Many times, people put themselves at the center of their chosen dream, they start building something where they are at its center on a pedestal, but not always. People who work for UN for eg (the truer spirits of that institution) come to form a community, same with people who may be on the gender spectrum outside of the norm, or ideologues in almost any pursuit. People will move to the suburbs or to Vegas to build a certain ‘reality’ too. Perhaps more so.
This constant transformation is something I really do like about living in gotham city.
Isn’t it strange that we need to consume life in order to live…. Even the strictest vegans will need to eat things once alive to gain their energy. The simplest grains, beans and vegatables were all once alive. You can survive only for so long with eating rocks, mineral salts and solar power (like trees do).
I feel like this is more a hallmark of evolution than it is a scientific requirement. We could probably just synthesize/convert energy (think heat or motion, in the form of the sun / those volcanoes. waves) and survive. heck plants are masters at it.
I guess that is how we were built. We need to eat life in either higher forms or lower forms (but some form) to stay alive. You could say – we need to eat DNA.
Paradigm shifts, Creative destruction, call it what you will.
The end of store in America, how can an employee hourly model compete with an online no-rent/no-brick model. Commercial landlords in malls must be scratching their heads as my beloved Barnes & Noble is. What survives will likely be a hybrid -> commission sales based / consumer’s distributing model (here’s a link). A pick up shop and delivery joint, closer to seamless and the restaurant business.
…
The problem of life is that it is not linear. Momentary enjoyment is about the flow state.
Currently reading AntiFraglie by Nicolas Nassim Taleb.
This came in my email today. Undoubtedly a push for Linkedin, but it was also good to celebrate and look back at all the hard work these past years. Now back down to earth :)
Hurray! You have one of the top 5% most viewed @LinkedIn profiles for 2012. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/profile/6/185/665
The watchmaker analogy as it is known, made by William Paley states that a complex design, such as an eye, implies a designer….
For whatever reason, this thought popped into my head one day while in the shower*.
The role of ‘feature level’ in discussing how a machine is naturally selected and evolves is critical. The order of ‘features’ can be inferred by deduction and something which I didn’t really get until well.. today.
The Gist:
Eyes, or other specialized organs must of developed very very early on in the morph-history of species with eyes. The proto-species where eyes developed must of used ‘eyes’ in a more general purpose. Think protists, sun-sensitive algae etc, maybe even slugs.. I’m not sure of the biological details, but they are irrelevant to the argument. That these innovations come from something less specialized, something more crude and general in application on early prototypes. You can even take something fully specialized and re-appropriate it, say a dishwasher as a propeller for a motorboat, but the initial will be less specialized than later iterations. The novel part (to me) is that you can deduce the order of innovations.
Certain features cannot exist without the supporting base functionality.
The analogy and explanation is easier to see when looking at a car made with rain tread tires on it. We might look at the wheels of a car and see the treads perfectly made, designed to pump water away from the wheels and infer that this complexity can only arrive by a designer, but it doesn’t really belie the history of the tire (made pneumatic by michelin), the tires and bending wood technology before that, spokes before that, discs and ball and round logs before that. The idea which must of come for all bikes, cars or trains is the wheel which evolved very early on in the ‘protospecies’ / a more primitive preceding model.
The feature ‘richness’ of certain abilities allows us to infer which modification came first and set an order, by logic. That is very cool.
*Footnote: Showers are prodigious places for random ideas. Most people would agree with that. My theory about this is that no other place is as isolating or makes you stand stationary with little else to do for 10-15 minutes a day.
The word for horse probably comes from word for hair right?
english: hair –> horse
spanish: cabello –> caballo
french: cheveux –> cheval
Guessing, hair came first and was later used to describe a horse (ie. running mane) –??? oui?
Don’t usually post these things, as Joni Mitchell put it ‘being part of the star-making machinery’.
I had a chance to sit in on Shakira filming a video. It was a fun.
…If you had a parent living in a house, who locked their children up in the basement, provided no school, no health, no care, no nursing, allowing a dank basement as the only place to be, living in derelict conditions. Almost all of society would condemn this as unfit parenting and yet it is what ‘America the parent’ permits collectively.
Growing up in Canada – through ‘Canadian Eyes’ – it is something which i see daily and still cannot (and will not) get used to; even we in Canada are not that far ahead.
Having sons and daughters of the Nation – not growing up to contribute to society (and in fact stain it) seems an unwise social policy.
When the cost of 15 years of health and education, which pays such dividends, and when it is implemented in earnest.
Incarceration costs society not just socially but materially 60k+ a year each person. With 5% of the population we hold 25% of the world’s prisoners. Read this. That is much higher than any healthcare expense year over year.
Better to have people in society than out of it.
Just my opinion on the matter.