Tag: philosophy

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Creativity Life & Philosophy

Thinker types: Contrarian versus the individual

Shall one play the contrarian or the individual thinker?

It’s not that interesting to be the rejectionist of the status quo just for the sake of it.

What’s more interesting is forming one’s unique style or opinion and projecting that with confidence — minus the bombast, of course.

What individuates individuals is their desire to make a difference because they believe in something.

‘Think different’ is a call for variation and abstraction. We need more of these poets, those who stray to the side to peruse the neglected fragments.

We need less antagonists, those who say the opposite of what everyone else is saying. Thinking outside the box is not a vocation, nor some deliberate existential thrill.

The self-appointed individual pokes at the mainstream without pretentiousness and criticism. She strives to make blind spots visible.

Once we get over the societal pressures of what we like and dislike, we get to focus on the heart work: what matters instead.

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Life & Philosophy Poetry

Assume everything and nothing

Assume everything and nothing

We suffer from a surfeit of choice.

An excess of options breeds indecision, the cruelest of frustrations. The result? We end up doing nothing at all.

Perhaps inertia is the best solution in these dizzying times. Instead of forcing the issue, we let nature take its course.

Yet, life doesn’t move unless we do. It begs for action and a subsequent reaction. Doing opens the floodgates to the invisible, exposing us to an infinity of blind spots.

Passivity and dynamism coexist

Surrounded by a morass of distraction machines, it’s no wonder we permit the frustration of ‘what’s next’ chip away at our patience. The bottomless scrolling newsfeed sucks dry the rudiments of attention and stokes impatience. 

Staring into the forest’s green space allows us to unlatch the eyelids from closeupness. The external world makes us think expansively, beyond the myopia of screen addiction.

We can assume that the best answer lies beyond us or deeper within. Hubris intact, we continue searching with the impossible hope of conquering ourselves.

Patience is the key to self-discovery. The wait never lasts forever if one never gets tired of waiting it out.

In the search of knowledge, we persist in converting inferences into future actions.

Categories
Life & Philosophy

Into the vortex of interestingness

Into the vortex of interestingness

We try to put things in the right order so we can find and solve even more problems.

The lighthouse in our mind is always moving faster than any dimension of reality. First, we act, and then we deduce. Lessons emerge from all the scars.

The impulse to learn more keeps the story of life flowing into a vortex of interestingness. The end goal is to avoid the maw of cynicism, as it works like a magnet in dire times.

Stimulation-seeking people look for a way of life. They feed off chasing ideals and improvising off risks. They are the sole judge of themselves, well-informed amateurs, fighting for simple awareness and the right to exercise real choice.

Thinkers keep digging deeper into the hole, seeking out the next set of burning questions.

Categories
Life & Philosophy

Awareness makes all the difference

Awareness makes all the difference

With the right instructions, the unfamiliar becomes manageable.

We follow the recipe with the hope that the convoluted reality seeps away into the froth. Directions become one less drain on our cognitive load.

Yet, had we followed our instincts we may not have gotten lost in the first place.

Adhering to Google Maps may lead us off the bridge, submerged into water. Writing with predictive text or auto-correct makes us prisoners of the information universe.

Knowledge is visceral, reality is learned. Shut our eyes on the open road, and we carve our own self-destruction.

Artificial intelligence is there to guide, not to provide all the solutions. One follows the prescribed path of his or her second-brain gadget, all the while gut-checking programmatic veracity. There are consequences for bequeathing all thought to the outer robot.

Awareness makes all the difference in inferring the future. Aliveness never goes full-on auto-pilot.

Keep the eyes on both the donut and the donut hole.

Categories
Life & Philosophy Poetry

Came, saw, and self-conquered

Came, saw, and self-conquered

The choir of one conducts an archaeological dig of the self.

What else to expect other than massive truth bombs?

The head is the instruments of instruments, yet it can’t outsmart the amygdala. The prehistoric brain fires on all cylinders.

The inner-narrative searches beyond the mask anchoring down any Shakespearean stage.

The ego has the power to build and the power to destroy. Once undone, there are no lily pads to jump to next.

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Life & Philosophy Tech

Life as protest

Life as protest

The revolution is in consciousness — passing and going into aliveness with a jolt of caffeine.

We can fool the brain into thinking that we’re more jazzed up than we are.

But one’s attitude and perspective don’t change overnight. We grow into ruthlessness through restlessness.

The audacity of hope is an oddball talent.

We once looked to religion to save the world. Now, we look at a few individuals who take big chances.

Entrepreneurs want to be gods.

Elon Musk basks in the simulated world’s glory, where he exploits his mental software to rewire predestined code. Always in overdrive, Musk creates endless opportunities to break the mold.

We can control our destiny if we’re crazy enough to believe it.

Categories
Life & Philosophy

Ignoring the inner-critic

Ignoring the inner-critic

We paint from what life gives us. We are the sum total of our experience.

But how often do we underthink our motivation and overthink action? Sometimes, it makes sense to think big and pull the life out of ourselves.

Stop doubting and start doing

The doer is a different breed. Dreams are meant to be followed, broken, failed at, and remixed.

There’s nothing more disruptive than someone chasing a so-called “pipe dream” with consistency and patience.

Why is the inner-critic so afraid to break the shackles and live up to their best?

To doubt is to do — doing is a way of building up courage and establishing narratives.

Categories
Life & Philosophy Psychology

Gagging on the dizziness of freedom

Gagging on the dizziness of freedom

Devoid of context, an abstraction so genuine it steers clear the badge of authenticity.

We, meaning-seeking creatures are lost in the dizziness of freedom. We follow an inner narrative only to see it conflict with the ideal stories we tell ourselves.

Dreams are saturated with misleading formulas that destabilize our consciousness. The truth lies between the lines, soaking in the gray space.

We may drink it black or flatten it with white, knowing all along that the coffee is the mere vehicle for imbibing caffeine’s truth serum.

Awake, finally embracing the certainty of being forever lost. We gag on two sips of Americano and spit anxiety back out again.

Categories
Life & Philosophy Tech

The art of doing nothing

The art of doing nothing

Relaxation is an art, antithesis to our ‘always on’ culture.

But it takes work to do nothing. Those tiny hits of dopamine are addictive.

The route to super-consciousness is paved with roadblocks, the least bit unplugging from the maelstrom of 24/7 news and unnecessary push messages.

We crave novelty

Chasing the rectangular glow for entertainment produces intense cognitive clutter. All the engagement makes us less happy in the end.

Distracted into busyness, we begin to decay into inanition. We miss the events unfolding in our day, permitting evil to spread as a consequence of blindness.

When we’re interacting in excess, we miss out on recharging and thinking. Disconnection is the only way to put the mind back into the mix.

The goal is not just to relax, per se, but to be free from collecting screen souvenirs. What we want to strive for is long-term serotonin.

We fight for the present to turn idleness into concurrent exploration. Time ticks to the clock as the mind does to the brain. Breathe and stop, we can stave off the ludic loop.

Surrounded by accelerated context, moments of silence seem to be the only way to make anything click.

Categories
Culture Life & Philosophy Poetry

The business of living

The business of living

The temptation to linger in maximum comfort — life isn’t a warm shower, you know.

One typically extends a staycation at the sight of pleasure or during a pandemic, displeasure.

People are adaptable, prepared to extend or narrow their comfort zone in a variety of situations.

They’ll even attend to simultaneous entertainments if it means they can get on with the business of living.

Moving across the stream, pinging into and around rocks, life thrives when you stop looking for happiness and absorb all the scars.

Where there is joy is pain, and lots of courage in between.